15

“A Menace to Society”

Kellerville, Illinois, the town where Walter Rife grew up, was so small that its post office was simply a shed next to a general store. It sold less than $1,000 worth of stamps a year. But Rife assured Ray that it would be a surefire target, filled with a rich cache of postal money orders—issued by the government and easy to cash with little identification.

On the night of March 7, 1955, three days before Ray’s twenty-seventh birthday, Ray and Rife bought a phony driver’s license for seventy-five cents in a bar in St. Louis.1 They then drove to Kellerville and entered the closed post office through a boarded window, netting sixty-six money orders as well as the stamps needed to validate them. The two, flush with success, set off for sixteen days on a seven-state odyssey through Memphis, as far south as Miami (where they bought a new car), as far west as New Orleans, and then north through a gambler’s hangout in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on the way to visit some acquaintances in Kansas City.²

“The trip was Jimmy’s idea,” recalled Rife. Ray did most of the driving, but “he couldn’t drive worth a shit” and “he wouldn’t talk too much,” said Rife.³ The two stopped at dozens of small country stores along the way, buying cigarettes, luggage, watches, clothes, a radio, and a camera.⁴ Rife cashed most of the $1,805 in money orders they used during their spree.⁵ “Half the time they’d never ask me for identification,” he later boasted.⁶ Rife also felt that Ray was a liability when he used the money orders. “He was a lousy forger. He’d walk into a store and just look guilty. He was heat personified.”7

Meanwhile, federal postal inspectors hunted for the thieves by tracking the serial numbers of the stolen money orders. As they were presented to the government for payment, a computer rejected them as stolen and pinpointed where they had been presented. But Ray and Rife kept moving, and the inspectors were invariably a day behind.

The two thieves stayed within speed limits to avoid attracting any police, and Ray initially kept his daily drinking to two shots of Walker’s Deluxe Bourbon and Coke. They sometimes pulled quick thefts. In Tampa they got lucky picking wallets and netted $1,700 in less than an hour.⁸ At night they often visited whorehouses, and they stayed, at Ray’s insistence, in the cheapest flop-houses.⁹ But while Ray was generally frugal, Rife noticed that “after a couple of drinks he really began to throw his money around.” He was eager to spend money on clothes and enjoyed primping in front of mirrors, spending a lot of time to ensure his hair was perfectly styled in the then fashionable pompadour.

There was also an impulsive side to Ray. When he and Rife were in Miami, Ray dickered at length with a used-car salesman over a 1949 Lincoln. The two were only dollars apart when suddenly Ray shocked Rife by agreeing to throw in his old car to cinch the deal. “I don’t know what possessed him to do that,” said Rife. “Ordinarily he was so chintzy.”¹⁰

Rife also discovered that Ray, while not looking for trouble, had a sharp temper and would not back away from any fight. “He was a mean, nasty fighter,” recalled Rife. “He fought to win, no matter what it took, a club, knife or gun. I never saw him lose a fight.”¹¹ Occasionally Ray would decide the fight was not worth the effort, as when Rife got into a wild scuffle with a transvestite at a Florida gay bar at which the two had stopped to buy more phony identification.¹² But at a bar in Kansas City, Rife saw that Ray could sometimes become violent with little or no provocation. “Somebody at a bar said something to him, nothing serious, like move your glass down. And Ray said, ‘Oh, forget about it,’ and he didn’t look mad, and he just walked out the front door as if he was forgetting about it. But he went around the place and came in the back door, walked up behind this fella and stuck a knife in him. The fella fell off the stool, and we just walked right out of there.”*¹³

On March 21, the two were caught in a springtime snowstorm in Kansas City. Ray decided to kill some time by buying clothes at Askins, a local men’s clothing store. He was fitted for a new suit, said he would pick it up later, and paid with a $75 money order.14 The manager was suspicious and called postal inspectors after Ray left. But before the inspectors arrived at Ray’s hotel, he had checked out, and he never returned to the store for the suit. Meanwhile, Rife had also become careless at a store only two blocks from Askins. He bought a $58 typewriter and paid with a $75 money order. The store’s owner was suspicious because Rife “didn’t seem the kind to buy a typewriter.”¹⁵ The owner noted the model of Rife’s car and jotted down its license number as he drove away. He also telephoned postal inspectors, but again they were too late to arrest the pair.¹⁶

Two days later, as a blizzard further blanketed the region, Ray impulsively decided to visit Hannibal, Missouri. Rife argued with him, but Ray prevailed. “I don’t know why he wanted to go to Hannibal,” said Rife. “He always wanted to go to Hannibal. But he didn’t know anyone there. We’d go there and sit in a bar. But he was like that.”¹⁷

As they neared Hannibal, a Missouri highway patrolman spotted the wanted license plate and called for backup. Ray and Rife were pulled over just south of Hannibal, together with Katherine Buskirk, an eighteen-year-old Quincy girl Rife had picked up earlier that day. Thirty-four of the stolen money orders were found, all stamped with the validating machine, which was hidden under the car’s dash.¹⁸ For the first time in his growing criminal career, Ray surrendered without trying to escape. At the station, when they asked him for his occupation, Ray smirked and said, “Lover.”*¹⁹

Both Rife and Ray knew that robbery of a federal post office carried serious penalties, and as a result they had already planned a defense if they were caught. Rife claimed that he had merely bought the money orders and validating stamp for $20 from a Quincy wino named Willard J. McBride.²⁰ It was, he said, just a coincidence that the post office McBride supposedly robbed happened to be in Rife’s hometown. Ray and Rife then asserted that they had bought identification papers for a dollar from an unidentified man in a St. Louis bar.* Actually, McBride was a fictitious person the two had invented, and they had used the name in passing several of the money orders.^†21 Their gambit worked. No one had seen them rob the post office and there was no physical evidence to tie them to the scene. On March 28, the two were booked only for passing stolen money orders.

When they appeared in federal court in Kansas City just eight days after their arrest, they were pleased to plead guilty to the reduced charge.²² Rife, who had a more serious criminal record than Ray, received a lenient sentence of thirty-six months at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. Ray was startled to receive forty-five months and upset that his sentence was harsher than Rife’s. He later speculated that it was due to his refusal to cooperate in the presentencing report—“I tried to protect myself and my family as best I could.”²³ What Ray did not know was that the probation officer who prepared the report, Edward B. Murray, recommended that Ray be given a harsh sentence. Again, Ray had lied repeatedly, saying that he was an only child, and that both his parents were deceased, and he offered a weak defense for each of his previous arrests. But Murray was not fooled. His presentencing report concluded, “Defendant shows absolutely no remorse at this time. He anticipates receiving a substantial sentence for the instant offense. In writer’s opinion he is a confirmed criminal and a menace to society when in the free world.”²⁴

The two convicts arrived at Leavenworth on July 7, 1955. Ray still simmered about the disparity in sentencing. Six weeks later, he wrote to the trial judge asking for a nine-month reduction in his time. “I reed 45 months, my codefendant reed 36. We both plea guilty to the charge of forgery,” Ray wrote. But the judge rejected his petition and the sentence stood.

Leavenworth was one of the country’s most famous prisons when Ray entered. “That’s where they separate the men from the boys,” said Rife. “They treat you like a man. It’s a tough place, full of big-time people.”25 Ray, in his own book, says that while his “fellow prisoners were bank robbers, drug traffickers, mobsters, Communists … and bent labor leaders.… Leavenworth is just another jail.”²⁶ Serving time no longer involved any trauma for him. He was now comfortable in jails, finding an order in the institutionalized environment that did not exist in the more chaotic and less predictable outside world. By this time Ray found prison life “like a small city …. like life on the outside. You have a place to live, a place to eat, a job to do, rules to follow, and people you have to get along with.… Anything you can get on the outside, you can get in prison.”²⁷ He also had accepted a maxim that helped him become accepted by most other inmates: “Informants are about the lowest life form in the prison food chain.”²⁸

Prison authorities found he had almost no interest in rehabilitation. “This man has no trade nor skills, is not interested in Vocational Training or Self-Improvement programs,” concluded an interim Leavenworth report. “His only interests are to work in the culinary department.”²⁹ After initially being placed in the fire department, Ray worked in the bakery but was quickly removed “for not being dependable.”³⁰ Another report, written a year after Ray arrived, again showed no promise of rehabilitation. “He apparently lacks foresight, or is afraid of the future, as he absolutely refuses to look forward. He claims that he can do his time better if he doesn’t think … and apparently is enjoying his present situation.”³¹

While prison officials thought Ray made no progress, he was doing all the right things as far as his fellow convicts were concerned. Working out in the exercise yard with weights, he pumped himself up by nearly twenty pounds.* He took typing and English classes, two prerequisites for becoming an effective jailhouse lawyer. And he also joined a Spanish class, useful since he “wanted to get out of the United States entirely” upon his eventual release.³² “I’d say Leavenworth did Jimmy Ray more good than anything that ever happened to him,” commented his cohort Walter Rife, who saw him almost daily at the prison. “Leavenworth is where he grew up.”³³ Of course, “growing up” meant something different to a career criminal such as Rife than it would to most people.^†

Again, as in Pontiac, Ray did not have a single visitor, but he did write to Jerry and John, who were incarcerated for much of the same period.34 The brothers’ common fate—prison—bonded them more strongly to one another.

There was only one incident that blemished Ray’s prison record. On September 12, 1957, he was approved for the prison’s honor farm, a much sought-after transfer since it meant less work and greatly enhanced freedom. However, he rejected it. According to a later prison progress report, Ray had refused the move “due to the fact that he did not feel he could live in an Honor Farm Dormitory because they are integrated.”*³⁵ Except for the honor farm, Leavenworth was a racially segregated prison, with blacks fed and housed in separate dormitories.³⁶ Ray, then twenty-nine years old, had never lived or worked near a black person. He was not about to start.

By April 1958, Ray was ready for a conditional release, whereby he would be transferred to Kansas City and required to check in daily with a parole officer. On April 15, Ray was set free and given $100, another turnout suit, and a dollar for the bus ticket to Kansas City.³⁷

* Ray has never spoken about the knifing incident, although when asked by Playboy in 1977 if he had ever stabbed anyone, he replied noncommittally, “I can’t remember ever stabbing anyone. Of course, I’ve been in a few fights.” Without an exact location or time, it has not been possible to locate a police report about the Kansas City incident, assuming the victim even filed one. However, if Rife’s recollection of the event is accurate, it is significant, since many of Ray’s strongest defenders point to his supposed lack of violence prior to the King assassination as evidence that he did not have the disposition to carry out that murder. “His criminal record is all one way, entirely non-violent,” contends Harold Weisberg. If Ray, however, had the capability to stab someone because he did not like the way that person spoke to him, it could indicate a streak of violence that was part of Ray’s underlying personality. Ray’s family members are split over whether he had such a violent streak. His uncle Willie Maher thought Ray would only shoot someone if he were “hopped up.”

* When booked, Rife gave his name as Vernon Elmo Rife, one of his many aliases. After King’s assassination, until the FBI determined that Walter Terry Rife was actually the person arrested with Ray, Rife’s alias caused confusion and anxiety, since at first the FBI thought it could not find one of Ray’s former accomplices.

* At the time, the two seemed to present a coordinated story. However, more than twenty years later, Ray tried to put all the blame on Rife. He wrote that when he ran into Rife in Quincy, Rife told him he had broken into the Kellerville post office and stolen the money orders. According to Ray, Rife “made me an offer: if I’d drive him to Florida, where he could forge and cash the paper, he’d pay me for transportation. Then we’d part company.” In his first book, Ray put the blame solely on Rife for passing the stolen money orders, but in his second book, he said Rife passed “most” of them. Actually, Ray passed twelve of the twenty-seven money orders presented by the two during their spree.

^† When Rife was interviewed by the FBI after the King assassination, he admitted that McBride was a concoction. While Rife would not confess to the burglary of the post office to the FBI, he did admit that “he and Ray obtained the money orders in Adams County, Illinois. He said that the Post Office at Kellerville, Illinois, is located in Adams County, Illinois … and that neither Ray nor Rife obtained the money orders outside of Adams County.”

* Ray, always a bit of a hypochondriac, looked fit, but continued to complain to prison doctors about a wide range of ailments, from headaches to chronic difficulty in breathing due to allergies. Although he was often at the infirmary, his records note that he refused any rectal tests or examination of his genitals, an action that some psychologists have interpreted to fit with Ray’s possible repression or fear of latent homosexuality.

^† Author Clay Blair, Jr., presents Ray as a “reticent, awkward hillbilly” during his time at Leavenworth. Blair concludes that “Ray was rejected by his peers. He withdrew into his shell, as usual, bottling up who knows what rage and anger.” But available prison records reveal that Ray’s adjustment was actually untroubled, and he left other prisoners alone, and they did the same with him.

* Although several dozen family members, associates, and prison inmates of Ray’s have spoken about his racial biases and feelings about blacks, the honor farm incident is important since it is one of the few recorded events that demonstrates the depth of Ray’s feelings about blacks. Twenty years later, Ray told Playboy in an interview that he had refused to go to the farm since the prison handed out extra time for marijuana possession, and since blacks were there, he assumed they used marijuana and he might get in trouble by just being there. Thirty-six years after the event, in a televised trial of his case on HBO, Ray went even further in defending his rejection of the transfer: “There was a possibility that I could get ten years for drugs since some of the blacks out there used marijuana.” According to Ray, while the whites in the prison made “homemade liquor” the blacks and Mexicans used marijuana. The author could find no evidence that any white inmate at Leavenworth ever had his sentence increased because a black inmate had used or left marijuana nearby. As for the contemporaneous prison documents that demonstrate Ray refused the transfer because the farm was integrated, Ray contended that “these records have been falsified for years.”