14

The Red Top Caper

Ray hitchhiked and rode freight trains east, but by April 18, he had reached only Marion, Iowa. When the train stopped there, a deputy sheriff, Harlan Snyder, searched the cars looking for hobos and spotted Ray crouched inside. Snyder frisked him and found one of the silver-dollar rolls from the Chinese restaurant heist. Snyder arrested Ray for vagrancy and suspicion of robbery and booked him into the nearby Cedar Rapids county jail.1 Ray told the police that he had been honorably discharged from the Army and, equally untrue, that he was just returning from Los Angeles where he had worked as a drill press operator for Brynes Sheet Metal Company. As for the coins, Ray claimed he had won them in Las Vegas by gambling with a man he called Bill Holland.² According to Ray, while he knew that Holland lived in Salt Lake City, he could not describe him. The police found no evidence that any such man existed—Ray had apparently invented the character. But in the three weeks he was in custody, the police failed to link the coin roll to any reported robberies in the cities Ray had visited.

Although this was only his second jail stint, he adapted better to confinement. He put on the weight he had lost in Los Angeles, and actually so enjoyed the view of the Iowa River from his cell that he “was thinking of sticking around until the weather improved before making any noises about getting sprung.”³ But after the police inquiries came back negative, he was released on May 8 and given a four-month suspended sentence for vagrancy.4 Deputy Snyder drove him directly from the courthouse to the bus station, bought him a one-way ticket to Chicago, and waited until the bus pulled away from the station with Ray aboard.⁵

In late May Ray returned to Quincy. When he checked in with his family, he found it had further deteriorated. Garbage was piled inside the apartment, and Ceal and Speedy were still often drunk. John, recently turned nineteen, had robbed a service station the previous December. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree burglary and was now serving a two-to five-year sentence in the Indiana State Reformatory at Pendleton. Jerry, at fourteen, had fallen in with, as he put it, “some fellas my own age there in Quincy [and] began to roll drunks, snatch purses, and the next thing I knew I was on the way to jail.”⁶ He was committed that January to the Illinois State Training School for Boys at St. Charles, Uncle Earl’s alma mater. Psychological tests administered to him there showed he “functioned between low, average and dull in intelligence.”⁷ Jerry took part in a prison riot and got another eighteen months tacked on to his robbery sentence. He was put on parole in 1951, but he violated it in less than a month with a grand larceny conviction and was sentenced to the tougher juvenile penitentiary at Sheridan, Illinois.⁸ As for eleven-year-old Melba, her emotional problems had worsened. A now familiar character in Quincy, she shuffled along the streets, stooped sharply over, her eyes darting everywhere but almost always cast downward. The other two middle children—Carol, nine, and Franklin, six—were erratically attending the local St. Boniface school under the name Ryan.

Probation officers still monitored the Rays. On one visit it was reported that the children “ran wild in the streets. They urinated out of the windows and shouted obscenities at people passing by.”⁹ Astonishingly, later that year Ceal would be pregnant with her ninth child, Max.

Ray worked briefly at the Quincy Compressor Company, but he moved back to Chicago that summer. It marked the start of nearly two years of relative stability. Although he lived in run-down rooming houses, Ray had only two addresses during that time. “I generally stayed inside the law,” he later wrote.¹⁰

In July he took a ninety-cent-an-hour assembly-line job at a plastics company, Neo Products, but left the following month for higher-paying work in the envelope-manufacturing department of Arvey Corporation.¹¹ That fall, Ray, who wanted to earn a high school diploma, enrolled at the Academy for Young Adults, a block from the Cook County courthouse. He soon bought a black 1949 Buick.

When his paternal aunt, Mabel Fuller, visited, she was pleased at how settled he seemed. Ray, typically exaggerating, boasted that he was attending Northwestern University.¹² He was dating a girl, also a factory worker, for the first time anyone in the family could remember.* Mabel met her and thought she looked liked a young Ceal.¹³ Ray’s landlady told Mabel that her nephew was a clean, quiet boarder who never caused problems. Mabel returned to Quincy convinced that Ray was finally on the road to self-respect and success.

It was difficult, however, for Ray to be patient with his new lifestyle. The work was hard and the pay little. The easier and faster money to be made in crime was always a lure. And there was no one close to him who could serve as a role model in the straight world. For reasons still not clear, after ten months at Arvey, Ray suddenly did not show up for work on June 15, 1951. Ten days later he wrote to say he had resigned. He went to Mom Maher’s Quincy house for a two-month stay, any apparent relationship with a girlfriend over.^† He also stopped attending classes at the Academy for Young Adults, short of the requirements to earn his much-wanted high school diploma. On July 23, he was stopped by Alton police for driving a car without license plates, city identification, or a driver’s license.¹⁴ Three days later he was arrested for “investigation,” charged with vagrancy, and given a ninety-day sentence.¹⁵

In September, Ray returned to Chicago and found another job, assembly-line work at a manufacturing company, Borg-Ericson.¹⁶ While he was there, the news from his family in Quincy worsened. Speedy finally abandoned Ceal and the children. In March 1952, he took what little money the family had saved and moved in with another woman, assumed the name Gerry Rayns, and went to work at a furniture factory.

Ray’s Borg-Ericson job lasted only eight months. On the night of May 6, 1952, wearing a sports shirt and dark slacks, Ray hailed a Red Top taxi at 1:00 A.M. and told the heavyset driver, Lewis Knox, to take him to 67 Cedar Street, a dark, quiet, tree-lined street. Cars were parked on both sides, so the taxi rolled to a stop in the middle of the road. Ray then suddenly drew a pistol and shoved it against the back of the driver’s head, demanding both money and the taxi itself. Ray intended to steal the car and use it as the getaway vehicle in the robbery of a bookie operation. While Ray was hijacking the taxi, an accomplice was waiting near the target in Ray’s own Buick.17

Unfortunately for Ray, at that very moment a thirty-two-year-old production manager for a local advertising agency, Robert Everhart, was walking to his own car. He glanced up in time to see the glint of a gun barrel and froze. Next, Everhart watched as the driver suddenly got out of the taxi and walked rapidly away. Then he saw the gun-toting passenger scramble over the rear seat and put himself behind the wheel as though he intended to drive away.

But the cabbie had evidently taken the keys, and suddenly a frustrated Ray leaped from the taxi and sprinted down the street. Everhart, who came from an indigent working background (his mother had scrubbed floors at night to support the family) was infuriated that Ray had tried to “rob a poor cab driver who has to work like hell for his money.”¹⁸ So he took off after Ray, who by now had scampered through a construction site and then down an alley. “When I made it to the Buick, my partner took off in the opposite direction,” Ray recalled.¹⁹ He continued running.

“He could run like hell,” Everhart recalled.²⁰ Everhart decided to outfox Ray by doubling back, thereby hoping to catch him as he exited the alley. As he sped around the corner, Everhart almost ran directly into an unmarked police car. He excitedly told the officers about the robbery and jumped into the patrol car’s backseat.

“He can’t get out of that alley,” one of the policemen said. “It’s a dead end.”

The cruiser pulled to the front of the alley, turned off its lights, and parked to block the exit. Both policemen stepped outside, their revolvers drawn. In a moment, Ray came tearing around the corner at full speed, heading directly toward them. “Stop!” the police yelled in unison. Ray reversed and raced toward a small fence that separated the alley from the backyard of a row house. One of the officers, George Green, fired a warning shot, but Ray ignored it and jumped the fence. He cut through the backyard and either tripped or dived through the basement window of the house, landing on his head and causing a large gash. When the two policemen arrived, Ray, slightly dazed, was climbing the staircase to flee.²¹ Green ordered him to stop, and when Ray again did not, Green shot him. The bullet passed through his right forearm and grazed his left arm as it exited.²² Ray then crumpled onto the staircase, bleeding from both his cut head and his bullet wounds.

The police dragged him by his armpits out of the house and back to their patrol car. As they propped him against a brick wall and called for a police wagon, Ray stared at Everhart. “What are you going to get out of this?”

“I hadn’t even thought of that,” Everhart later said.23

Ray’s luck finally improved. An inebriated woman left a nearby bar, and seeing the police and the bleeding Ray, she started accusing the police of beating their prisoner. She was so strident that the police tried to calm her, and instead of patting down Ray, they merely handcuffed him and placed him in the backseat of their patrol car as they waited for the wagon. While he was in that car, “I managed to wrestle the revolver out of my pocket and shove it under the seats.” Ray was smart enough to know that simple act would “reduce the charge against me from armed to unarmed robbery.”²⁴

He was taken to Cook County Hospital, where his head was partially shaved and his wound stitched.²⁵ While lying on his stomach on the operating table, with his arms outstretched, a police photographer took a photo of him. His head and both arms covered in bandages, he was taken to the police station, where he was booked for armed robbery. Everhart came along and picked Ray out of a lineup, although since he was the only one covered with bandages, it would have been impossible to miss him.

Jerry Ray, who was then on parole and working at a riding stable in suburban Chicago, read about the crime in the newspaper. He was not surprised that he had to discover it in the paper, since “Jimmy didn’t tell nobody nothing.”²⁶ Jerry sent a clipping to his mother. “A few days later I couldn’t believe it,” Jerry recalled. “Ceal was walking down the gravel road, she had walk all the way from Le Grange. It must have been six or seven miles. I told her I could of borrow my employer’s car and pick her up, she said she didn’t want to bother me. They was a few cabins behind a tavern for rent, no lights. I got her a room there. Ceal look very sad that time sitting on side of the bed white and wore out, with her head down trying to keep from crying. The next day she went into Chicago and saw Jimmy. I found out later she was broke, had to work as a dishwasher to pay her way home. After that, Ceal didn’t have nothing else to live for.”²⁷ Ceal’s life had been unraveling for a long time. She had placed so many of her hopes on James, her first child. He had seemed to get out of the house before the worst of the trouble had started. After Marjorie’s death, he was her favorite. But seeing him in prison in Chicago shattered whatever fantasy she had conjured for him. He had not escaped the Ray background after all. Heartbroken, Ceal returned to the rest of her family in Quincy.

As for Ray, while the police did find $11.50 that he had stolen from the taxi driver, they could not find the gun.²⁸ Ray pleaded not guilty and swore he never had a weapon and that Everhart and the taxi driver were mistaken about seeing one. On June 2, 1952, he pleaded guilty to simple robbery. In the presentencing investigation, Ray told the probation officer that he had been honorably discharged from the Army, had never been in “serious” trouble with the law before, and promised that if he received probation he would “get a job and never become involved with the law again.”29 On June 4, he was sentenced to one to two years in a state penitentiary.*

Joliet, famous for the Chicago gangsters it housed in the 1920s, was the “reception center” for the Illinois prison system. There, Ray was issued his prison uniforms and given medical and mental aptitude tests. He scored 111 on an Army Alpha test, a “superior” rating.³⁰ On another test, to determine academic achievement, he finished slightly above a typical second-year high school student, with his strongest subjects being history, geography, and reading, and his worst spelling and grammar. The psychologist who interviewed him to determine where he should be placed in the prison system found Ray to be of “superior intelligence” and “without psychotic or intellectual defect.” However, he also thought he was an “unstable personality—[a] questionably improvable offender—problematic prognosis.”³¹ Ray told the psychologist that he was one of three children, and that his father had been a railroad brakeman and a “good provider” until his death by heart attack in 1947. He also claimed to have finished fifteen months of high school and to have been honorably discharged from the Army. “Apparently he was somewhat of a solitary person,” the psychologist noted in his report, “but said he had occasional dates. He denies any persistent drinking, although admitting occasional alcoholic excess.”³² The report concluded that Ray was “seemingly a person who has some drive, but has not been able to settle down to just what he wants,” the recommendation was that Ray be given one of the best assignments in the state prison system: placement at a medium-security prison in Pontiac, where prisoners with a possibility of improvement served their time.

In early July, he was transferred to Pontiac. There he was assigned to the main cell block and worked in the kitchen. With 1,300 prisoners, it was radically different from the small, transient county jails where he had previously done his time. “Big houses” such as Joliet and Pontiac have a certain order and hierarchy imposed by the prisoners. Although Ray was technically a newcomer to prison life—called a “fish” by other prisoners—he knew from Uncle Earl how to behave like a veteran prisoner. He was quiet, stayed to himself, and kept out of trouble. Ray made no friends and had no visitors, and wrote only to Ceal and Jerry.³³ One official later said, “The best men you know the least. Ray was one of those.”^†34

Soon he was moved to the “honor farm” just south of the main building. It was a much sought-after transfer by inmates, although Ray described it as “a monastery, minus the prayers and psalms.”35 There were only one hundred men on the farm, with ten to a dormitory. During the day, prisoners were free to walk around in a wide area. Ray again worked in the kitchen, but he soon landed a soft job in the warden’s and officers’ quarters. The psychologist who handled his case later remarked, “He knew how to conform, there’s no doubt about that.”³⁶

A six-month progress report on Ray noted that he was “good” in his “attitude toward his work” and “his ability to get along with officers and other inmates” but “only fair as far as proficiency, initiative, progress and ability to work in the free community were concerned.”³⁷ After nearly a year at Pontiac, he was finally eligible for parole. For another progress report, prepared to determine whether parole should be granted, Ray’s case was discussed at staff meetings and he submitted to one long and one short interview. The report is telling in several areas. It concluded that Ray’s “traumatic” service in the Army had left him “highly unsettled,” but that “he does not care to tell, or cannot verbalize” exactly what went wrong for him in the service.³⁸ The report concluded, “He seems to be rather solitary and unhappy.… It is difficult for us to make an adequate prediction in this case. In view of the two known instances of impulsive delinquent behavior connected with drinking, the lack of any indication of change or progress here, and the age at which this pattern was continuing, we would judge that he would eventually repeat this behavior, especially if discouraged.… The prognosis seems to be problematic to doubtful.”³⁹

Parole was denied. Six months later, a “Release Progress Report” summarized not only how Ray had served his time, but also forecast the outlook for his future. According to prison officials, he had a “clean card,” a rare accomplishment for a first-timer.⁴⁰ It concluded, however, “His future plans are indefinite.… Inmate’s delinquencies seem due to impulsive behavior, especially when drinking. There is a relationship to inmate’s tendency to be easily discouraged, and this tendency still exists.… The prognosis is doubtful.”⁴¹

On March 12, 1954, after serving twenty-two months, Ray was finally freed. Two days earlier he had turned twenty-six. He was given his release papers, $25, a one-way bus ticket home to Quincy, 130 miles away, and a turnout suit—a dark-colored outfit made by prisoners—to be worn until he could get some regular clothes. Ray stopped in Quincy for a few days, and then went to Mom Maher’s house in Alton, where he learned how thoroughly the rest of his family had disintegrated. Since John, now twenty-three, had been released from reform school a year earlier, he had burglarized a tavern, stolen a car, and tried to escape from jail.⁴² In June 1953—under the name John Ryan—he had pleaded guilty to the theft of the twelve-year-old jalopy worth only a couple of hundred dollars. Nevertheless, because of his earlier run-in with the law, he was given a tough sentence of five to ten years in Menard.43 There he joined Uncle Earl.⁴⁴ Jerry, now eighteen, had become the extroverted clown in the Ray family, but was still just a step behind John and James. On February 1, 1954, Jerry and three friends snatched a purse from an elderly lady and knocked her down. Jerry’s share of the proceeds was only $20, but when he was arrested, the charge was burglary. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of grand larceny and sought probation, but it was denied because of his previous record. At his February 24 trial, Jerry was given a harsh two-to five-year sentence at Menard.⁴⁵ He entered the prison as Gerald Ryan, and there joined his brother John and his uncle Earl.* For John and Jerry, it was fortunate that their uncle was at the same jail: He broke them into prison life and taught them how to do their time without causing any problems.

As for the rest of the children, they had finally been taken away forcibly from Ceal. In a futile last attempt to keep them, Ceal had visited Robert Hunter, the county and juvenile judge responsible for her family’s case. But not only did he already know the horrific conditions at home and that Ceal was “a lush,” but also on that day her clothes smelled and her hair was so filthy that it stood almost straight up. Hunter thought she was the “most slovenly woman” he had ever seen.⁴⁶ When he rejected her heartfelt pleas, she became, according to Hunter, “a wild gal,” screaming and cursing. He had her removed and issued the order to take the children. On the day the court officials arrived, they had to pry the youngest child, Max, from Ceal’s arms as she wailed and sobbed.⁴⁷

Max turned out to be retarded and was placed in a special home in Alton.⁴⁸ Suzan and Franklin were wards of the court in a Catholic home in Springfield, Illinois.⁴⁹ Melba was put into a special school in Ohio for emotionally disturbed children. “I knew she had gone when she said she had seen Jesus,” remembered Jerry.⁵⁰ After she had pulled her hair out by the roots, broke the lights, and turned on the water and flooded her room, she was locked into a padded cell, which she managed to set on fire.⁵¹ Soon she was committed to the state mental hospital at Jacksonville, Illinois, where she would stay until she was twenty.⁵² As for Ceal, Ray learned she had moved in with her mother immediately after the children were taken, but that was short-lived. She had returned to Quincy, where she was a regular at local taverns, and had been arrested for assault and battery and larceny.53 There were reports that she had turned to prostitution, and later a judge would hear testimony that one evening, “when she was unable to find any dates [she] had brought in her fourteen-year-old daughter, Carol, and attempted to obtain prostitution dates for her,” although years later Carol averred, “I never bedded with anybody.”⁵⁴ Carol, described by neighbors as “a very rough and wild individual,” was also placed in a foster home.* ⁵⁵

That spring and summer of 1954, Ray stayed mostly in Alton. He did some work for his uncle Willie Maher, who was then a part-time painting contractor. He also pumped gas, a comedown from when he boasted to Mom Maher that he would own a service station. Ray was back to his regular but controlled drinking in local taverns, where he often watched television for hours, fascinated with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on Communist influence in government. Still fancying himself wise in politics, he became a strong McCarthy booster.⁵⁶

But again, Ray found that his legitimate jobs did not bring enough money, and he decided to rob a dry cleaner in the adjacent town of East Alton. Around 4:00 A.M. on the night of Saturday, August 27, in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, two security guards were patrolling a row of shops. They saw that one of the side windowpanes to National Cleaners was broken, indicating a possible forced entry. Calling for police backup, they also roused the owner of the cleaners to come and open the store. While they waited, they fanned out in the nearby area and found a single car they did not recognize. Thinking it might belong to the burglar, one of the security men disconnected the car’s distributor so it could not be started. Finally, when the store’s owner arrived, they entered. Inside, they saw a man at the rear window, incredibly coming back into the store. Although they shouted for him to stop, the solitary figure jumped back out the window and took off running. When the two security guards ran around the rear, they saw that the burglar’s shoes were still there, having gotten stuck in the thick, soggy mud outside the store. Then, after a few moments, they saw him run and jump over a low fence, and though they gave chase, he got away. When they returned to the strange car on which they had earlier disconnected the distributor, they found a pair of wet brown work gloves had been thrown on the front seat. The thief had evidently run back to the car but had been unable to start it. Searching the car, they quickly found a registration card in the name of James Earl Ray.

At dawn the next day, an Alton policeman found Ray walking along the railway tracks wearing a gray gas-station uniform, his stocking feet bruised and bleeding. Despite his protestations of innocence, he was taken to the police station and booked for the theft of $28 from the cleaners.57 “He was very quiet,” recalled Alton police chief Harold Riggins. “When he was lying, he’d duck-jerk his head several inches to the side like he was expecting you to slug him or something. He wouldn’t look you in the eye.”⁵⁸ Andrew Biro, one of the security guards involved in the chase, remembered, “He was a real bulldog type. He denied his guilt and never changed his story once. When you asked him a question, he’d pretend he wasn’t listening.”⁵⁹ Ray, as usual, denied everything: The shoes, which were his size, were not his. He did not know how his car had gotten there. He was just out for a long walk when stopped by the police, he said.*

His bail was posted by a local nightclub owner, Dominic Tadaro, who charged Ray a steep interest.⁶⁰ The Alton police suspected Ray of a number of other petty crimes, ranging from stripping parked cars to filling half-pint bottles with cheap wine to sell to winos when the liquor stores were closed, and had decided to make his life miserable. “He was the most reluctant, sarcastic, overbearing liar I ever saw,” said Chief Riggins.⁶¹ Before his trial could begin, Ray was arrested two weeks later for vagrancy. Again, Tadaro posted his bail. This time Ray skipped town and moved back to Quincy.

“In Quincy I was scraping by, trying to stay even on my monthly payments to Tadaro,” Ray later wrote. “I had to steal to make ends meets, living in cheap hotels. In the course of hanging around the usual joints, I met Walter Rife, a petty thief and part-time pimp. Uncle Earl, who was then out of jail, tried to warn me off the acquaintance, but I ignored him.”⁶² Ray fails to mention, of course, that he had known Rife as a teenager in Quincy. Rife had had his own problems since the two had last seen each other: He had deserted the Army in 1947, was captured and sentenced to Fort Leavenworth, and then escaped. He was subsequently rearrested and convicted of forgery. When he ran into Ray, he had recently been released from Menard, where he had spent time with Jerry and John Ray.⁶³

As their friendship rekindled, the two spent much time together. They became close enough for Rife to learn things about Ray that few outsiders ever discovered.^† He found that Ray was a loner with a flash temper, but he was dependable in a pinch.⁶⁴ While he never heard Ray talk of his mother or father (“I always figured they was dead”), Ray constantly spoke of Uncle Earl. “There was a little hero worship in there somewhere or other,” said Rife. “He approved of anything his uncle did.”65 Ray was somebody who thought not about the future, but only about “the next day.… I think he’s just spent his whole life trying to make a living without working. He’s just a thief.”⁶⁶ But he added that Ray was “capable of killing, as we all are.”⁶⁷

Rife also saw that Ray had developed an “immense” dislike for blacks. “There was nothing particular he had against them, nothing they had done to him. He said once they ought to be put out of the country. Once he said, ‘Well, we ought to kill them, kill them all.’… He was unreasonable in his hatred for niggers. He hated to see them breathe. If you pressed it, he’d get violent in a conversation about it. He hated them! I never did know why.”⁶⁸ When Rife and Ray visited bars, Ray “would get a little hot about it if a Negro came in. But I’d say, well, leave him alone. He’d say, that’s what we’ve been doing all along, leaving them alone, that’s the trouble.”⁶⁹ Rife, however, did not find Ray’s racial attitudes surprising. He later told author George McMillan that “if you talk to 85 people out of 100, they’ll tell you the same thing.… I took it for granted, I knew what he [Ray] was talking about.”*⁷⁰

But what they talked about the most was how to make a score that would allow them to escape from the poverty-stricken existence they hated but continued to eke out. By early 1955, Ray, with Rife’s help, was on his way to becoming a three-time loser.

* In a 1970 interview with author George McMillan, Ray’s sister Carol insisted that he had had girlfriends, although she could not recall any names. McMillan’s notes of the interview indicate that Carol was extremely sensitive to the implication that Ray might be homosexual. Ray was often ambiguous about his sexuality. His father worried that James’s one friend in Chicago, the German Stumm, was “queer.” Later, in prison, statements from fellow prisoners indicate that while Ray was not a homosexual predator, he enjoyed receiving fellatio from other men, and was known to pay for it. However, Walter Rife, who later spent two weeks with Ray on the road, saw no evidence Ray was gay. “I know he wasn’t no freak,” said Rife. “We slept in the car together many nights and he never went for me.” Yet years later, one of Ray’s own attorneys, Robert Hill, told author McMillan that he wondered whether Ray was gay since he thought Ray was “sexually attracted” to him. Arthur Hanes, Sr., was convinced Ray was a “limp wrist.”

^† In his two books, Ray does not even mention this girlfriend. Instead, he describes his entire period in Chicago by writing, “I lived alone on Fullerton Avenue. My social life included occasional visits to the local bars. Once in a while I caught a Cubs game.”

* In Tennessee Waltz, Ray wrote, “In retrospect, I really see no reason for this caper. I had a job at the time, and didn’t have a goofball or alcohol habit to support. Further, even if the undertaking had been successful, it still would have been meaningless, because a couple thousand dollars would not have appreciably improved my financial status for long. Such robberies as this I believe merely reflects a lack of self-discipline.”

^† Ray kept so much to himself that when inmates who had served time with him were interviewed after the King assassination, almost none could recall him.

* Of all his sons, Speedy expressed contempt only for Jerry, sometimes calling him “nigger” because of his dark complexion. Speedy later told author George McMillan that Jerry was “never any good,” and that he was a “clown that lets whores insult him and take all his money.” He ridiculed Jerry’s writing to a lonely hearts’ club in the hope of marrying a wealthy woman, and he concluded that Jerry was stupid, too slow-witted even to be a boxer.

* Years later, Carol said, “I don’t hate my Mother for giving me away. Nobody’s perfect. Court records don’t tell everything.”

* In the presentencing report for a subsequent 1955 crime, Ray admitted that he had burglarized the cleaners, but denied stealing anything.

^† Although Rife saw a frank side of Ray, even he later admitted, “There will always be a mystery in James’s life, until he decides to tell it himself.”

* Ray has often been asked whether he is a racist, but instead of simply saying no, has attempted to finesse the issue, leaving the distinct impression that he holds many of the same prejudices as his siblings and others who were raised in the same poor, working-class, white neighborhoods. When asked by Playboy in 1977 how he felt about blacks, Ray contended that there were “cultural differences” among the races, and added, “Well, they’re just here and I’m here. I don’t really have no really strong feelings one way or the other. I guess they’re looking out for their interests as everyone else is. And, of course, I’m trying to look out for mine. But I don’t see no conflict there.” Yet even his brother Jerry admitted to the FBI that James “was not particularly fond of Negroes.” More than two dozen inmates who served with him described, in detail, his animosity toward blacks. However, typical of defenders of Ray, conspiracy theorist Harold Weisberg, writes, “Most of those who knew him say Ray showed no signs of special feelings against Negroes.”