9

Story for Sale

The British solicitor appointed to represent Ray, Michael Eugene, met his client for the first time on June 10, 1968, two days after his arrest. Ray gave his trademark weak handshake, looked at the floor most of the time, and seemed to answer the initial volley of questions with grunts. Then suddenly he leaned forward, tapped his fingers on the table, and pointedly declared, “Look, they have got me mixed up with some guy called James Earl Ray. My name is Ramon George Sneyd. I don’t know this Ray guy and they are trying to say that he is me. I’ve never met the guy in my life and I don’t know anything about this. They are just trying to pin something on me that I didn’t do.”1

A few minutes later, Ray told Eugene that he wanted him to contact his brother, Jerry Ray, in Chicago. Eugene did not say anything, but wondered if his client realized that by giving his brother’s surname he had exposed his real identity. Next, Ray instructed Eugene to call a lawyer in Birmingham, Alabama, Arthur Hanes. When Eugene asked if he knew him, Ray said no, “but I know he’ll represent me and look after my interests back in the States.” One other lawyer, J. B. Stoner, the fanatical counsel for the virulently anti-Semitic and racist National States Rights Party, had offered his services free of charge.² But at that early stage, Ray seemed interested only in the premium names in the legal profession. As backups to Hanes, he told Eugene to contact F. Lee Bailey in Boston and Melvin Belli in San Francisco.

Did he have any money to pay these top-ranked attorneys? asked Eugene.

“I’m not worried about their fees,” Ray announced. “Even if it takes a hundred thousand dollars, I can raise it. They’ll be taken care of.”3

Before Eugene left, Ray, who had turned talkative, also expressed his anger over a press report that claimed he had spoken to Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson, Jr., who had flown to London the previous day. “There’s been a pack of lies printed about Vinson seeing me.… I saw nobody. I have never seen anybody.… I want to make this quite clear so the people back home won’t think that I’ve seen anybody.” This emphatic side of Ray was remarkably different from the quiet, monosyllabic man Eugene had first encountered. He seemed eager to convince Eugene that he had not even thought of cooperating with the police or talking about the crime.

Arthur Hanes was a good choice by Ray. The fifty-one-year-old former FBI agent had been mayor of Birmingham in 1963 when King had his civil rights campaign there.⁴ It was under the Hanes administration that police commissioner “Bull” O’Connor had turned police dogs and fire hoses on the marchers. Hanes had compounded the incident by bitterly denouncing King.⁵ A right-wing segregationist, his biggest courtroom victory was the acquittal of four Klan members accused of killing Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit who had been shot to death while driving a car with a young black SCLC volunteer between Selma and Montgomery.

Ray knew about Hanes’s career—“I do read the papers quite a bit,” he once said—and was impressed by the Liuzzo acquittal.⁶ Hanes worked with his son, Art junior, then twenty-seven (he later became a state judge in Alabama).

Besides asking Eugene to call, Ray also wrote to Hanes, still using his Sneyd alias, requesting representation.⁷ By Monday, June 17, Hanes was leaning toward taking the case. He arranged for expedited passports for himself and Art junior so they could fly to London.⁸ From his initial review of the facts, Hanes thought it likely that Ray was a hired assassin whose motivation was money. His possible suspects for the paymaster were colored by his political views, and patently illogical: black militants, backed perhaps by Castro or even Chinese Communists. But Hanes was also innovative. He had previously heard the rumors that J. Edgar Hoover had tape-recorded some of King’s extramarital liaisons, and he contemplated getting those, playing them in a trial, and arguing to the jury that a jealous husband may have had a better motive for killing King than James Earl Ray.⁹

On the eve of his departure for London, Hanes received a telephone call from William Bradford Huie, a well-known contemporary author who had written extensively about the South, the Ku Klux Klan, and civil rights, including the bestsellers The Revolt of Mamie Stover and The Execution of Private Slovik. King had written the introduction for another of Huie’s books, Three Lives for Mississippi, which was about the 1964 murder of the civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Huie also believed in checkbook journalism—“there is no substitute for money,” he once boasted. Huie had paid KKK informers for Three Lives. When he wrote a book about the 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, he paid $4,000 to two Klansmen who had been acquitted at trial, and with the legal impunity granted them by their acquittal, they boasted to Huie about how they killed the youngster for whistling at a white woman.10

Huie had an interesting offer for Hanes. “The only way we are going to know what happened in the King assassination,” he contended, “is for someone like me to make a deal with your client to tell me all he can about his involvement and who helped him.” Huie wanted exclusive access to Ray and the right to publish his story after the trial. In return, he would strike a financial deal with Hanes and Ray. Hanes was interested. He was about to spend his own money on the upcoming trip to England, but he told Huie he was not going “to chase around the world and defend that boy” unless there was money to pay the bill.*¹¹ Huie made Hanes a proposition: He was willing to spend up to $40,000 of his own money investigating the story if Hanes, after meeting with Ray, thought “the prospects are good.”¹²

Hanes was not able to give Huie a quick answer, however, because he was not allowed to see Ray on his first trip to London, which lasted four days.¹³ The magistrate had not yet decided the extradition matter, so Hanes was considered to have no standing in British courts.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and Memphis prosecutors were aggressively working to get Ray extradited back to Tennessee. The U.S. government had to convince the British there was probable cause that Ray was the assassin.¹⁴ And Ray could be tried for no other crime in the United States than that for which he was extradited.^† A team of prosecutors from the district attorney general’s office in Memphis coordinated the extradition effort with the Justice Department and the FBI.

In mid-June, the Justice Department submitted to the British courts a skeletal outline of its case against Ray, including affidavits of witnesses and experts ranging from FBI agent George Bonebrake, who said he had identified Ray’s prints on the rifle, scope, and binoculars found at the murder scene, to Donald Wood, the Aeromarine Supply worker who sold Ray the rifle.15 The government’s presentation also revealed one of the early problems with the prosecution’s evidence. FBI ballistics expert Robert Frazier—who had handled the ballistics on Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano for the JFK assassination—submitted an affidavit that said the murder bullet was identical to the other bullets found in the bundle at the scene, but that “because of distortion due to mutilation and insufficient marks of value, I could draw no conclusion as to whether or not the submitted bullet was fired from the submitted rifle.”¹⁶

During the extradition proceedings, Ray made weekly trips to court from his prison, first at Cannon Row, and then at the Wandsworth maximum-security facility. British law prohibited a prisoner from being held without charge for longer than seven days at a time, so at his weekly visits, the magistrate would remand him back to prison for another seven-day stretch. On each of those trips from prison to court, Ray was accompanied by the same policeman, Alexander Eist, a sergeant on Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, an elite group of policemen assigned to high-profile and difficult cases. Eist had also been with Ray for nine hours on his first morning in a British jail. There, and on each of the seven jail transfer trips, as well as whenever Ray was in a detention cell at the courthouse or in the court itself, Eist was handcuffed to him.¹⁷ “Initially, he didn’t want to say anything to anybody,” recalled Eist. On the first day, Ray only glared at him, and it was uncomfortable. “But I suppose [because of] my constant contact with him, he began to look on me as somebody he could talk to.”¹⁸ Eist helped Ray by getting him eating utensils—they were at first prohibited, since authorities feared he might try suicide—and performed other small favors, such as giving him magazines. Ray appreciated Eist’s efforts and slowly the two developed a rapport, rare for Ray with anyone. Yet even then the conversations were mostly one-way, with Ray doing the talking. Eist noticed that if he asked Ray a specific question, Ray would “refuse to say any more, and then sit there and stare at me.” Instead, Eist found it best to bring up a subject, and then Ray would conduct a monologue. Once Ray started, Eist said, sometimes “you had a job to stop him talking.”

Ray once began by listing the differences between the British and American justice systems. Then he told Eist about the time he served at the Missouri State Penitentiary, and at another point said he kept himself in money as a fugitive by “small robberies.”19 “The only person that he ever mentioned to me at any time was a brother,” testified Eist, but he did not name him. The conversations that Eist remembered best were those nearer the end of their time together, when they got around to discussing blacks. Ray called them “niggers” and “he told me that he tried to get into Africa at some stage—he said to kill some more of them … he didn’t go into a great deal of conversation about that because apparently he had been unsuccessful in whatever he tried to do. He did, in fact, mention the Foreign Legion.”²⁰ Eist had the feeling that Ray considered himself a hero of sorts for the King murder. “He was continually asking me how he would hit the headlines in the newspapers, and he kept wanting news of publicity.” When Eist told him that his arrest and the King case had not made a major impact in Britain, Ray told him, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Finally, King’s murder came slowly into their talks. Ray was convinced that he could make real money from the notoriety of the case, and he was not worried since he believed that all he could be charged with was conspiracy—“I will only get one to ten, or one to twelve years for that,” he confidently predicted. “It was at this time,” Eist recalled, “that he said there was no way that they would actually be able to pin the murder on him except that he had thrown the gun away; that was the mistake he had made. I recall he said to me he had seen a policeman or police vehicle and panicked and thrown the gun away, and his fingerprints would obviously be found on this weapon.”²¹ Eist also remembered that Ray “had never ever shown any regret.”*

While Ray was talking to Eist, the British magistrate was reviewing the affidavits and submissions from the United States. On June 27, Ray appeared in court for the brief extradition hearing dressed in a blue-checked suit with a blue open-necked shirt. He chewed gum, occasionally scratched the back of his neck, and seemed unperturbed by the proceedings. Michael Eugene, his appointed solicitor, argued strenuously that the crime was “political” and was therefore exempt from extradition.22 When Ray was called to testify, the court clerk asked him for his religion so the appropriate Bible could be used. Ray replied softly that he did not have any religion. On the stand, he denied that he knew King, bore a grudge against him, or killed him.²³

Five days later, Magistrate Frank Milton ruled there was sufficient evidence to extradite Ray back to the States to stand trial for murdering King.

Once the order was in, Hanes returned to London and announced that Ray would not appeal the decision. He saw Ray for half an hour on July 5, and again for thirty minutes the following day. They sat in a tiny interview room, separated by a glass partition covered with wire mesh. A guard stood directly behind Ray. Ray’s British solicitor was with Hanes.²⁴ Ray implored Hanes to sue Life magazine because of a story it had printed portraying him as a childhood bully who developed into a lone assassin. But Hanes was not interested in talking about civil suits until he was first certain that he, and he alone, would represent Ray. Hanes firmly announced that he would not represent Ray if J. B. Stoner of the National States Rights Party joined the defense team. Ray agreed. Hanes then turned to his major reason for the meeting, that he and his son would defend Ray so long as Ray agreed to tell his complete story for publication after the trial. With Michael Eugene as a witness, Ray—still using the alias “R. G. Sneyd”—signed a one-page document granting Hanes a broad power of attorney; the right to act on Ray’s behalf as exclusive agent and attorney for contracts, negotiations, and the sale of entertainment rights; and most important, the transfer to Hanes of a 40 percent interest in Ray’s share of any agreement eventually reached with author Huie.²⁵

Reporters were waiting for Hanes when he left the courthouse. He announced that he had agreed to take the case and then was asked how his fee and expenses would be paid. He did not mention the agreement in his suit pocket. “He assured me he can take care of my fee,” Hanes said disingenuously. “He had indicated he may be able to raise the money from his family. He ain’t going to pay me with love, I can tell you that.”*²⁶

When he returned to Birmingham, Hanes met with Huie and shared his first impressions of Ray. “He’s cagey, like an old con. He doesn’t look you straight in the eye, sort of hangs his head and grins out of the side of his mouth. He’s incapable of trusting any man on earth. He’s definitely not like any Negro killer I’ve ever known. I don’t think he hates Negroes. I don’t think he has strong feelings about anything. If he didn’t kill King for money, I can’t see that he had any motive.… I told him we had to have the truth, and had to sell it. “^†27

Huie was now confident that Ray was worth the gamble of a formal contract. His lawyer had already drafted an agreement, and he and Hanes signed it in on July 8, 1968. Ray executed it on August 1 when he returned to the States. It guaranteed Ray and Hanes an equal split of 60 percent of any money earned by Huie on the case, whether for books, magazines, television, or film.^‡

However, since Hanes was then incurring expenses, and Ray had no money, the lawyer and defendant wanted some money up front from Huie. So Huie, against the advice of both his literary agent and his lawyer, signed yet another agreement with them, in which he agreed to pay Ray and Hanes $40,000 over several months, as a nonrefundable loan against any money eventually earned by selling Ray’s story.*²⁸

The problem with such an agreement was that it created an inherent conflict of interest from the very beginning among lawyer, client, and journalist. Ray’s sole interest was in being acquitted of the charge of killing King. The truth was secondary to beating the rap, as it would have been for any four-time loser who had spent most of his adult life in prison. Part of Hanes’s interest—obtaining an acquittal—coincided with Ray’s, but he also wanted to ensure that Ray’s story was profitably exploited. There were also ethical considerations for Hanes. For instance, after the British magistrate had ordered Ray extradited, Hanes advised Ray not to appeal. However, under the terms of the contract with Huie, the cash payments from Huie would not start until Ray returned to the United States. Could that have affected Hanes’s decision as to whether his client’s best interest would have been served by appealing the extradition ruling? Would future decisions, such as the question of whether Ray should testify at his own trial, be influenced by the fact that if Ray’s story was to be sold in a book or film it might be more valuable if he had not already told it on the witness stand.?^† And Huie claimed he wanted only the truth, which might well have been different from what was necessary for the defense to craft an acquittal, or even to get a hung jury.²⁹

This arrangement encouraged Ray to develop a dramatic tale that was commercially profitable. Merely contending “I didn’t do it” would not entice many people to buy a book or watch a movie. The better the story, the more money he might make.

Hanes and Huie were eager to hear his story, but British prison officials would not permit a private interview.³⁰ So they had to wait for Ray’s return to the United States. At midnight on July 18, in a secret transfer dubbed Operation Landing, Ray boarded a C-135 U.S. Air Force jet. It normally carried 125 people, but that night it had only 6 passengers: Ray, a physician, and four FBI agents.³¹ Hanes’s request to accompany his client had been rejected.³² Ray remained strapped into an aisle seat near the rear, except for the one time he went to the bathroom, accompanied by two of the agents. The group arrived at Millington Naval Air Base, eighteen miles from Memphis, at 4:00 A.M. The purpose of the midnight flight was so that Ray could leave London under cover of darkness and arrive in Memphis the same way, which made it easier to keep the press away and monitor security.33 If there was a conspiracy, there might be those who would try to silence him. Even with no conspiracy, there was real fear of a KKK or white supremacist attack to set him free, or black militants trying to avenge King’s death.³⁴ No one wanted a repeat of Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Oswald.

Shelby County sheriff William Morris, Jr., greeted Ray, who stood naked in the aisle of the plane, his head cast down. He had been stripped of his clothes in preparation for a quick physical exam before being turned over to the sheriff. His skin was a sickly white.³⁵

Morris spoke. “James Earl Ray, alias Harvey Lowmeyer, alias John Willard, alias Eric Starvo Galt, alias Paul Bridgman, alias Ramon George Sneyd, will you please step forward three paces?”

Ray did so. The accompanying doctor listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, and after a few minutes nodded to Morris, who then read Ray his rights. A deputy opened a small case and removed a pair of dark green pants, a green plaid shirt, and sandals. After Ray had put them on, a bulletproof vest was slipped over him, and then his hands were manacled to a leather harness. Ray did not say a word as Morris and his deputies virtually carried him down the plane’s steps and lifted him into an armored vehicle borrowed from the Jackson, Mississippi, police. The armored car was led by two squad cars of guards carrying submachine guns, and followed by another three squad cars, two with sheriff’s deputies and the third with federal marshals.³⁶

A half-hour later Ray was back in an American prison for the first time in over a year. An editorial in The New York Times welcomed his return to the United States, since now the truth about King’s murder might be discovered. “The meager evidence offered in the extradition case—all the United States has to show is ‘probable cause’ that Ray was the assassin, not proof—is hardly enough to persuade anyone that the killer acted alone. If and when James Earl Ray goes on trial in Tennessee, the United States and the world will want to see any evidence throwing light on whether there was a conspiracy to kill King or whether it was the work of one vengeful or unbalanced man.”³⁷

* In 1978, George Wilson, a former Midwestern leader of the United Klans of America (UKA), told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that the UKA had contributed $10,000 to Hanes for his Ray representation, under the pretense of Hanes’s legal representation of a group of North Carolina Klansmen. Two sources independently confirmed Wilson’s charge. Beyond financial assistance, the Klan also evidently offered additional help to Hanes. The committee received information that Robert Shelton, the UKA’s imperial wizard, had arranged with Hanes to review the jury list in Ray’s trial in order to identify sympathetic jurors. Hanes vigorously denied receiving financial or other assistance from the UKA for his defense of Ray.

^† This technicality could have caused havoc once Ray returned to the United States if the defense had been clever enough to exploit it. The government presented a case at the extradition hearing that Ray was the sole shooter who murdered King on April 4, 1968. If, upon his return, Ray had admitted his involvement, but instead claimed it was a conspiracy of which he was only the provider of the weapon or the getaway driver, the prosecutors could not have tried him. When CBS’s Dan Rather asked Ray in 1977 if he “knowingly had anything to do with the shooting of Dr. King,” Ray did not give a direct answer, but instead fell back on the technicality of his extradition, telling Rather, “I think that is a new question because when I was extradited … the thing they could try me on would be doing the actual shooting … aiding and abetting and conspiracy or that stuff, they wouldn’t be able to charge against that under the treaty terms.”

* For years after the extradition hearings, no American or British authority ever asked Eist if he had had conversations with Ray. Yet Eist had told acquaintances, including a London reporter, about them. In 1976, he met an American Air Force major stationed in Great Britain and related the same story he had told others for nearly a decade. The major told Eist he should contact the FBI, since there was an effort to have a new investigation into the case under way in Congress. Eist did so and as a result testified under oath to the House Select Committee on Assassinations on its opening day of public hearings, November 9, 1978. His testimony caught Ray and his then attorney Mark Lane by surprise. Lane responded by trying to attack Eist personally, charging that he had been placed on trial for accepting bribes and had also been dismissed from the police because he was suspected of being involved in jewel robberies throughout England. Lane was wrong. In fact, Eist had been charged in one case involving a false alibi, but it later turned out that his name had mistakenly appeared on the original arrest record as the officer in charge of that case. Once the error was discovered, the case against him was dismissed and the government paid his defense costs. When Eist retired much later, it was actually for medical reasons, not for suspicion of criminal behavior.

* Ray’s brothers, John and Jerry, had set up a “defense fund” for him. They held a press conference in Memphis and asked for contributions. It soon closed, since so little money came in. However, they were inundated with hundreds of letters of support, good wishes, and congratulations for James.

^† Hanes was not the only one who reached an early conclusion that if Ray did it, it was likely for money. John Ray, after James’s capture, said, “if my brother did kill King, he did it for a lot of money. He didn’t do anything if it wasn’t for money.… If he does have to stand trial, I would like to see him get the same sentence as the guy who killed Rockwell.” John C. Patler, the assassin of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, received a twenty-year sentence.

^‡ Since Hanes had already obtained 40 percent of Ray’s 30 percent, it meant that Hanes was really earning 42 percent of the entire project, while Ray was left with 18 percent. However, in early September, without Huie’s knowledge, Ray and Hanes modified their own agreement so that instead of Hanes permanently deducting 40 percent of Ray’s share, Ray would give him all his early share until Hanes had received $20,000 plus expenses. That meant that after Hanes collected that $20,000 fee, Ray would again have his full 30 percent of the overall deal. Clearly, Ray was willing to give all his immediate money to Hanes on the possibility that his story would bring in enormous profits, and then, with a full 30 percent share, he would collect far more in the future. “Had I been consulted,” said Huie, “I would not have agreed to any change in the original two-party agreement between Mr. Hanes and Ray. Because I wanted Ray and his brothers to get the money at once and develop an appetite for more, so that I would be in a stronger position to compel Ray to tell me the truth.”

* The agreement was structured so that Huie paid Ray $10,000 upon signing a book contract, $5,000 one month after Ray was transferred to jail in the States, and then $5,000 a month after that until the total of $40,000 was paid.

^† In a subsequent lawsuit that Ray filed against Hanes, Huie, the lawyer Percy Foreman, and others (Ray v. Foreman), the court concluded that Ray was a voluntary and intelligent party to the agreements and there was no evidence to support Ray’s contention that the conflicts of interest compromised the way his case was litigated. The fee arrangement negotiated by Hanes, however, was in apparent violation of the American Bar Association’s code of professional responsibility.