16

A Professional Criminal

It was Ray’s bad fortune on arriving in Kansas City to discover that his parole officer was Edward Murray, the same person who had written his harsh presentencing report three years earlier. “Neither of us showed much enthusiasm for renewing the acquaintance,” Ray recalled.1 Murray was strict and required Ray to give daily updates of his efforts to find work. Instead, Ray decided that if he stayed in Kansas City, “I’d be right back in Leavenworth.”² Under the rules of his conditional release, it was possible for him to transfer to the jurisdiction where his family lived if the probation officer in that area was willing to add him to his caseload.

The remnants of the Ray family had begun migrating to St. Louis, mostly settling into a dirt-poor riverbank area called Soulard, similar to the crime-stricken river wards in Quincy.³ Speedy had been there since he abandoned the family, working in odd jobs and drinking less than when he was with Ceal. Mom Maher, who had lived most of her life in Quincy, had moved there and bought a run-down boardinghouse. She eventually persuaded Ceal to move in with her. Some of the children taken by the courts had returned: Carol was living with Speedy; Melba, released from the state mental hospital, was with her mother and grandmother, as was Franklin, who was released from the Catholic children’s home when he turned fourteen in 1958. John and Jerry Ray would also move to St. Louis when they were released from Menard. Ray decided that St. Louis was also where he wanted to be.4

After a few weeks in Kansas City, he used what money he had left to buy a pair of large metal clips and a few feet of heavy-duty electrical wire. He fashioned a makeshift hot-wire and stole a car to drive the 130 miles to St. Louis.⁵ Five miles outside St. Louis the car broke down, and Ray walked the rest of the way to Mom Maher’s boardinghouse. It was the first time he had seen his mother since she visited him in jail in Chicago six years earlier, and he was startled at how she had deteriorated. Ray, who had intended to stay at his grandmother’s rooming house, decided the atmosphere was too depressing. Instead, since he was broke, he asked Ceal for some money. “She lent me a little cash,” he recalled, “and I moved into an apartment house on Mississippi Street, not far from where the winos hung out.”⁶

Ray checked in with a local parole officer, who then authorized the transfer of his case file to St. Louis.⁷ According to Ray, during this time he worked part-time as a baker and then a cook. Actually, he went to the bakers’ union but could not find any work, and then landed a job as a cook’s helper at the nearby Glen Echo Country Club, a position he held for a single day before he was fired.⁸ Unable to hold a steady job, and in close proximity to the city’s winos, he reverted to a business he had dabbled in when living in Alton: “At the end of the week,” he recalled, “I’d stock up on fifths of muscatel, hold them until the package stores closed, and then on Sunday offer my wares at inflated prices.”⁹ This was profitable enough to carry him through the end of his conditional prison release in December 1958.¹⁰

A few nights before Christmas, Ray drove to Madison, Illinois, to visit, in his words, “a long line of bars, whorehouses, and gambling joints.”¹¹ At one of the bars, he got involved in a backroom dice game and quickly lost $200, all his savings. Ray went to his car, retrieved his pistol, and then robbed the bar and dice room. “It was a case of crook robbing crooks,” he later said.¹² Ray not only got back his money, but also had the bartender empty the night’s receipts into a sack, nabbing another $1,300. He then raced in his car across the Mississippi to St. Louis to escape the professional gamblers he had just robbed. Deciding to leave town until things cooled down, he drove south and briefly stopped in New Orleans to inquire at a local school about obtaining merchant seaman’s papers, something that he had decided would be worthwhile. Ray thought seaman’s papers were “a kind of passport to migrate to a foreign country.”¹³ But the New Orleans school for apprentice seamen was closed over the Christmas holidays, so he moved on, first to Brownsville, Texas, and then across the border into Matamoros, Mexico. At Leavenworth, Ray had listened as other convicts boasted of the time they spent in either Mexico or Canada when they had run from the law. This was now his first opportunity to judge how easy it was to leave the United States. In Matamoros he obtained a Mexican tourist visa and during the next several weeks he drove from Mexico City to Veracruz to Acapulco. Ray later told a fellow convict, Cecil Lillibridge, that he made some money by smuggling into the country small appliances that had a high tariff in Mexico. In the port town of Campeche, he sold the goods to a local smuggler.14 He told another convict, James Owens, that he had a fight with a man in Mexico City and had to strike him on the head with his pistol.¹⁵ Ray spoke about no other problems, said he made himself understood with pidgin Spanish, and enjoyed the cheap prices and readily available liquor and prostitutes. In each port, he inquired about obtaining seaman’s papers, but could find nothing.¹⁶

“By February 1959 I was back in St. Louis, bootlegging to the Sunday winos,” Ray remembered.¹⁷ One of his main customers was a middle-aged drunk nicknamed Dirty John, who was soon picked up for robbing a local businessman at gunpoint. The car Dirty John was driving had previously belonged to Ray, prompting the St. Louis police to burst into Mom Maher’s rooming house, guns drawn, looking for James. When Ray heard the police were searching for him, he again left St. Louis until the heat died down, this time heading for Canada, the other safe haven he had learned about at Leavenworth.¹⁸ He spent nearly three months there, living under the alias O’Connor and renting a room near Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal’s Latin Quarter.¹⁹ “It was a familiar setting,” said Ray. “An old town at the side of a river, full of gamblers, prostitutes, and bunco artists.”²⁰

Ray did not hold a regular job there, and perhaps pulled small robberies to keep himself in money. While he was in Canada, his uncle Earl, who helped steep him in crime, died of an apparent heart attack at the age of fifty-four.²¹ He was found under a railroad bridge in upstate New York, but Ray did not learn of his death until he returned to the States.

By early summer, Ray was back in St. Louis.²² He soon visited both John and Jerry in prison at Menard. Jerry remembered, “He was in a good mood then. We talked and laughed and planned a reunion.”²³ It was the first time James had seen both brothers in nearly nine years.

While Ray has portrayed his only source of income during this time as the selling of wine to drunks on Sundays, he actually was involved in a several-months’ spree of successful robberies. His accomplice was John Eugene Gawron, a fifty-eight-year-old heavy-drinking ex-con who had spent most of his adult life behind bars. Ray does not even mention him in his two autobiographies.

When Gawron was paroled in 1954, he had moved to Quincy and met Ray’s mother. Sent back to jail in 1956 for a burglary, he escaped from Menard in 1959 and returned to Mom Maher and Ceal’s St. Louis rooming house.²⁴ There he met James, and he later boasted that he taught Ray how to be a topnotch burglar, introducing him to tools used by professional thieves. The older Gawron thought of himself as Ray’s tutor, and although he liked the way James dressed in expensive and flashy clothes, he also tried to improve his dealings with women. It was to no avail; as Gawron later recounted, Ray was so shy with women that he would often lisp or stutter when introduced to one. Gawron quickly discovered, as others had before him, that Ray preferred prostitutes in brief encounters at third-rate motels.25 Although Gawron may not have had much success improving Ray’s love life, he did help his pocketbook. During the summer of 1959, Gawron and Ray pulled approximately twelve successful burglaries.*²⁶

Near the end of June, Ray, introducing himself as Jim O’Connor, met two other men who would soon be his accomplices. One was Joseph Elmer “Blackie” Austin, then fifty-seven. Austin had just been released from Illinois State Penitentiary at Menard after serving thirty-three of the last thirty-four years behind bars, most of them for the 1927 murder of a man in an armed robbery.²⁷ His accomplice in that robbery had been hanged for the crime. Some who knew Austin kept their distance from him because they thought he was slightly deranged (when tried for a subsequent crime, he was judged mentally incapable of assisting in his own defense).²⁸ But Ray took a liking to him.^†

The second person Ray met was James Owens, a chubby, five-three, forty-one-year-old ex-convict with eight previous arrests for robbery and burglary. He had also recently been released from Menard.²⁹ Both men were staying at the St. Louis Rescue Mission, a remodeled pink stucco theater that served as a skid-row halfway house for winos and ex-cons. Unknown to its director, the Reverend James Wynineger, who was a former Tennessee bootlegger, the mission was a point of contact for the lowest elements in the St. Louis underworld.^‡

Convicts just released from prison, as Austin and Owens were, are careful in sizing up other ex-cons, determining which, if any, they can trust. Both liked Ray. They judged him a quiet loner, a moderate drinker of bourbon highballs who enjoyed bluegrass and country music and “never pried or bragged.”30 Owens viewed Ray as a “thinker and a reader,” interested in a wide range of magazines and books, especially detective novels.³¹ Ray, who also read the two major St. Louis daily newspapers, seemed smart to the other two, and they later commented on how Ray was the type who “plans every angle before he makes a move.”³² They also discovered that while Ray had little interest in women (“they were something to use and forget”), he was a gun enthusiast, particularly about pistols and handguns.³³ Sometimes he went to secluded locations to target shoot, and according to Owens, he was “an excellent shot”—on one occasion when the two went shooting, Ray shot at a can and kept it bouncing by firing at it and hitting it repeatedly before it stopped rolling.*³⁴

Since Ray was unemployed but nevertheless appeared “well-heeled,” Owens and Austin figured that he was a professional thief. They classified him as a “pistol man” for future jobs.³⁵ When they saw Ray frequently in Gawron’s company, they correctly assumed that Gawron was Ray’s partner. But soon Austin, Owens, and Ray worked together to pull off even larger jobs.

On July 11, 1959, at a few minutes after 9:00 A.M., Austin, wearing a broad-brimmed brown hat and large sunglasses, pointed a nickel-plated revolver at the manager of a Kroger supermarket in St. Louis and demanded that he open the safe. His accomplice was a younger man, also with dark glasses, along with a white straw hat pulled low over his brow. The two thieves fled with $1,200, but not before they were caught on the store’s fixed-focus camera, normally used to identify check cashers.³⁶ In front of the store, the two men jumped into a waiting car with a driver already inside, and the vehicle screeched away.³⁷ That car was later involved in a crash and abandoned, but since it was stolen it did not lead the police to the robbers. However, the pictures snapped during the crime were useful. Two witnesses and the store manager pored over mug shots at police headquarters. It did not take them long to identify Joseph Austin as the stick-up man, and soon all three also picked Ray as his accomplice.³⁸ The police issued arrest warrants for both men, but they managed to stay free.^†

Almost a month later, on a blisteringly hot August 7, Austin and Ray reappeared, this time at an I.G.A. food market in Alton, its safe filled in anticipation of cashing weekly paychecks for regular customers.39 About 9:30 A.M. the two walked through the front door, Austin looking gaunt while Ray again wore a straw hat pulled low over his forehead. Ray asked for the manager, and then both pulled out pistols and demanded money. After clearing the cash registers, Ray ordered that the safe be emptied. When the employees responded slowly, he started screaming, running up and down the aisles like a “wild man,” according to one witness, until he located the quivering owner.⁴⁰ He dragged the owner back toward the safe. Meanwhile, unknown to the thieves, when the robbery began the butcher had crouched behind the meat counter and quietly telephoned the police.

After they cleared the safe, the thieves ran from the store, grabbing more money from the cash registers as they left. Their total take was nearly $l,000.*⁴¹ They jumped into a blue 1950 Buick. The store’s owner, Vincent Hromadka, kept a .22-caliber automatic rifle behind the counter. He fired half a dozen shots at the fleeing getaway car, none of them hitting their target.⁴² Ray, who was driving, slammed on the gas pedal, and as the car screeched from the parking lot the left front door suddenly swung open and he nearly fell out.

An armed robbery in Alton was a fairly rare event, and the small police force responded with an emergency alert. One police cruiser set off down Alby Street, along which the getaway car had sped away, and after several minutes the officers were astonished to see the car heading back into town. Suddenly the getaway car careened out of control, smashed into the backyard of a nearby house, and slammed into a tree. Both robbers leaped from the car and ran into an adjoining thicket.

The police found $342 in cash scattered inside the car, another $100 on the ground outside, two sets of license plates, and two fully loaded .38 revolvers.⁴³ Twelve policemen set out on foot to search the three-mile-square thicket. After a while, one of them, exhausted from the search, returned and sat in his patrol car. Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered to watch. An older man walked slowly from the direction of the woods and mingled with the crowd. The policeman thought something about him did not seem right. It turned out to be Joseph Austin. There was no sign of his accomplice.

When the police took Austin to the station, he quickly confessed to the crime. Three witnesses picked him from a lineup. But Austin initially refused to give up his accomplice, saying only that his name was Jack Sims. The three witnesses could not make a positive identification of Austin’s accomplice because of the sunglasses and hat he wore during the robbery. Although the Edwardsville grand jury would indict Austin and Ray for the robbery that October, neither man ever stood trial. Austin was returned to Menard on a parole violation and became sick with tuberculosis. Ray melted into St. Louis’s sleazy riverfront district. Having had his largest payday ever for the I.G.A. robbery, he felt more confident about his advancement to armed robbery. He did not know that he had left $15,000 behind in another of the store’s safes.

Without Austin as an accomplice, Ray now turned to James Owens. On October 9, the two went on an all-night partying binge.44 The following morning, “at the tail-end of a drunk,” according to Owens, they discovered they were broke. That is when they decided to rob a nearby Kroger supermarket they had cased the previous day.⁴⁵ Ray produced two revolvers.⁴⁶

Around 8:45 A.M. on October 10, Ray and Owens entered the Kroger store in St. Louis, their guns drawn. Owens stayed at the front of the store as a lookout. Ray, again wearing dark glasses and a large hat, walked directly to the manager’s office and demanded the money in the safe.⁴⁷ The manager told Ray that he could not open it without a second key and then paged someone whom he knew was too busy to come to the office. After waiting several minutes, Ray became nervous and ran to the front of the store, and he and Owens emptied the cash register of $120.⁴⁸ They then sprinted to a 1950 black Ford they had stolen earlier that morning.⁴⁹ This time, $18,000 was left in the safe.

As the two sped away, the Kroger manager ran outside and jotted down the license number.⁵⁰ A customer, Robert Culis, jumped into his own car to follow the two robbers. He stayed a block behind and watched as the Ford stopped next to a new green-and-white Plymouth and one of the thieves stepped out and drove off in the second car. He jotted down the license number of the second car and returned to Kroger, where that information was relayed to the police.⁵¹

Fifteen minutes later, two policemen noticed the Plymouth parked in front of a cheap rooming house at 2023 Park. They called for backup, and two detectives arrived almost at the moment when James Owens left and started to enter the Plymouth. He was immediately arrested and placed in one of the patrol cars.⁵² The uniformed police covered the rooming house’s front and rear exits, and the detectives went to the second floor. Suddenly Ray came out of the bathroom. One of the detectives identified himself and told Ray to stop. Instead, Ray ran to the rear sun porch. He stopped in his tracks when he saw another policeman in the backyard. Ray cursed, turned, and ran back inside, almost directly into the arms of Detective Harry Conners. Ray grabbed Conners and gave him a bear hug as if he were trying to squeeze the air out of him. Conners broke the hold and fired a shot over Ray’s head. Ray charged him again, and this time Conners smashed him over the head with the butt of his gun. Dazed, Ray still managed to stumble into an adjoining room. Conners followed and fired another shot, which finally caused Ray to stop.53

“I guess you want me for that Kroger store stickup?” Ray asked him.⁵⁴

When the police searched Ray they found $81.63, which he told them was his share of the loot. In his room they discovered two pistols hidden under the dresser, one a nickel-plated .38-caliber revolver and the other a Belgian 7.65-caliber automatic. Both were fully loaded.⁵⁵ The police also found a brown felt hat and green jacket, similar to those the thief had used in the Kroger robbery.

Ray was taken to City Hospital, where his head wound was stitched closed, a scene reminiscent of the followup to his taxi fiasco in Chicago seven years earlier. From there he was taken to police headquarters, where he told them that he was a baker and a Catholic and had finished two years of high school, and that his father was dead.⁵⁶ But when he was quizzed about the robbery, he refused to give any statement and denied making an earlier admission to the arresting officers.⁵⁷ Owens, however, did confess. He said that he had planned the robbery with Ray; that Ray had provided him with a pistol; that they had cased the supermarket before the robbery, and that he and Ray had split the money at the rooming house. Owens then picked Ray at the station as his accomplice.⁵⁸ Later, Ray was positively identified by six witnesses from the Kroger robbery.⁵⁹ The police also brought in two employees from the I.G.A. food market that Ray had robbed in August. Both identified him as one of the robbers.⁶⁰ According to a later prison commitment report on the robbery, “the police officers reported he sat there with a silly grin on his face and said, ‘I cannot deny it and I won’t admit it.’”⁶¹ Later, he finally signed a statement acknowledging his role in the Kroger robbery.⁶²

Ray and Owens were charged with first-degree robbery with a deadly weapon of the Kroger store. Ray was also charged with resisting arrest, and his bail was set at $10,000 and his trial scheduled for December 15.* On that day, Earl Riley, an elderly deputy sheriff, showed up to escort Ray through an underground tunnel that connected the city jail with the courthouse. Ray was handcuffed for the short walk. When they arrived at the courthouse, Riley led Ray to a cell behind the courtroom. He had unlocked one of the handcuffs when Ray suddenly grabbed Riley, shoved him violently into a row of benches, and then kicked him in the gut before running from the cell and jumping into the open elevator. Before the doors closed, Riley recovered and ran over to grab the door. Ray tried in vain to push him away. By this time, an armed guard down the hallway saw the commotion and ran over with his gun drawn. Ray stopped, turned to the wall, and covered his face with his hands. Ray’s court appearance was canceled that morning and several guards returned him to his cell.63

Having failed in his impetuous escape attempt, Ray next demanded a jury trial and directed the strategy of his case, even insisting that he take the stand, although that meant the prosecutor could then enter Ray’s criminal past into the record. As Ray’s crimes had become more ambitious, his sense of his own ability to defend himself grew proportionately. His court-appointed lawyer, Richard Schreiber, later said, “He pretty well ran his own trial. He came on hard, like a jailhouse lawyer. He was very persistent.”⁶⁴

The prosecution’s case seemed strong, with six witnesses, the physical evidence found at the rooming house, and most important, Owen’s and Ray’s signed confessions. In his defense, Ray presented a single witness who claimed, in contradiction to one of the policemen, that when Ray ran out of the bathroom the door had been closed, not open. No one understood what that was supposed to signify.

When Ray took the stand he denied everything, repudiating his signed statement. He now said he had had nothing to do with the robbery, that the evidence seized at the rooming house was not his, and that the police had violated his constitutional rights. He even stunned his attorney by voluntarily denying that he had offered a $200 bribe to one of the detectives to perjure himself by claiming he had not found two pistols in Ray’s room. Until Ray mentioned this issue of possible witness tampering, the jury had never heard of it. “He didn’t make a lot of sense,” recalled Schreiber. “He rambled and got kind of wild.”⁶⁵

The jury took twenty minutes to find Ray guilty as charged. His strategy of running his own trial had backfired. Owens, who pleaded guilty to the robbery charge, was sentenced to seven years.⁶⁶ Ray drew twenty years in the state penitentiary.

Three months later, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1960, James Earl Ray was ready to be transferred. He was a four-time loser who had just turned thirty-two a week earlier. His brothers John and Jerry were only a few weeks away from being released from Menard. But he would miss them. Ray was transferred, in a heavily guarded railcar with forty other prisoners, to his new home, the Missouri State Penitentiary, one of the toughest prisons in the United States.

* One of the most common misconceptions about Ray is that he was a hapless criminal. That conclusion is mistakenly drawn by casual observers who focus only on Ray’s arrests. However, between those arrests, Ray sustained himself with dozens of successful crimes. His run of burglaries with Gawron was only one such period during which he stayed in crime but free of the law. Jerry Ray later estimated that James probably pulled a robbery every two to three weeks when he was out of jail. As for Gawron, who became so friendly with the Ray family that many of them referred to him as Uncle Jack, he did not have the same luck with James’s relatives. In 1961, he was arrested with John Ray and Albert Pepper, Carol’s husband.

† Curiously, Ray omits any mention of Austin in both of his books.

‡ Occasionally, convicts stayed incognito at the mission after local robberies. While Rev. Wynineger was unaware of the misuse of his mission, a subsequent investigation uncovered many of the excesses, and convicts were banned.

* Owens’s observations about Ray’s interest and talent with guns, reported here for the first time, are potentially important because many of Ray’s staunchest defenders contend that there was no evidence Ray ever fired a gun after he left the Army in 1948.

^† Ray evidently viewed his robbery of a supermarket as a move up in his criminal career. In a 1977 Playboy interview, when Ray was asked if he thought there was “much chance for success in liquor-store robberies,” he replied, “That type of robbery is non-sense. You don’t get any money, plus you get just as much time as if you rob something substantial.” The interviewer then asked, “What do you consider substantial?” “Well, a supermarket,” Ray replied. “That’s really a corporation’s money and they’re probably gougin’ it out of somebody else, anyway. Better to rob them than an individual.”

* Jerry Ray later told author George McMillan that one of the things he most admired about James was that “he’s got steel nerves—he just walks in like its an every day thing, get the money, and walks out.”

* While he was in jail, he was treated by a prison physician, Dr. Dowd, for an ailment. There are no records of the treatment, but the jail’s warden, William Borger, later said it was for treatment of a venereal disease. Ray denied this and instead insisted he had a kidney infection.