18

Breakout

At the close of 1965, Ray’s time at Jeff City was evaluated in a “Pre-Parole Progress Report.” It concluded he was an excellent worker in the bakery and noted he had only one contraband violation on his record. Under “Family Relations,” it stated, “His brother, Jerry, corresponds regularly and visits occasionally. He sometimes hears from his brother, John.”1 As for postrelease plans, Ray indicated he wanted to live with one of his brothers. The associate warden who prepared the report, Carl White, noted that Ray “denies use of narcotics” and concluded that while he seemed “well-established” in prison, “prognosis for making a successful adjustment in society is considered marginal at best.”²

Ray had a parole hearing scheduled next for 1967 (his application for early parole three years before had been denied).³ The long-standing appeal of his 1959 robbery conviction was still pending in the courts.* However, at the start of 1966, Ray decided not to count on either of those possibilities to set him free. “Three and a half years had elapsed since my last escape attempt,” he later wrote, “too long, I decided.”⁴ In preparation, he arranged a transfer from the bakery to K Hall’s clean-up crew, allowing him to roam outside his cell until as late as 9:00 P.M.5 But after a few months he asked for another transfer, this time to J Hall, since he had discovered that any escape from K Hall involved a thirty-foot drop from the windows to the ground. “I began collecting tools,” he later wrote, “hacksaw blades and a long pole with a hook at the end used to open hard-to-reach casement windows—and watching for my chance.”⁶

His chance came the day after his thirty-eighth birthday, March 11, 1966.* It was a Friday night, when movies were shown at the prison; since, as Ray said, “the darkness was an excellent cover in which to exact revenge.” Most of the prison guards were assigned to the movie hall.⁷ While the film ran, Ray placed a dummy in his bunk and returned to a scaffold that his work crew had used to clean the higher windows at the rear of J Hall.⁸ There, he used a hacksaw to cut through a small wire screen and squeezed through, trailing a fourteen-foot pole.⁹ He was now in a covered passageway that linked several buildings. Crawling nearly 140 feet, he finally reached the edge of the administration building, the nearest to the outside wall. He planned to use the pole, with a hook fastened to its end, to snag the roof gutter, pull himself to the top of the roof, and then drop down outside the wall, landing on the road in front of the prison.

“Everything went smoothly,” Ray recounted, “until the gutter gave way. I fell about 15 feet, injuring my right arm.”¹⁰ No guards heard the commotion. Looking around, he spotted a small shack on the roof where he had fallen. It contained a generator. The door was padlocked, but he yanked the air-vent slats away, crawled inside, and then replaced the vents so as not to attract attention. He waited until after midnight and then slipped out to try again scaling the wall. He was surrounded by guards before he ever reached it. They took him to the hospital for his injured arm.^†

Typically, criminal charges were not brought against a prisoner for an escape attempt; instead, the usual punishment was six months in solitary, followed by six months in restricted segregation. But the warden, Harold Swenson, decided to make an example of Ray, and the district attorney formally charged him with attempted escape, an offense that could have added several years to his sentence. Ray pleaded not guilty and demanded a trial. Charles Quigley, a local attorney, was appointed to defend him.¹¹

“He turned out to have some creative ideas,” Ray recalled. “He suggested to the judge that I might not have been in possession of all my faculties when I allegedly tried to escape.”12 To determine whether Ray was competent to stand trial, the judge transferred him in September 1966 to the Missouri Hospital for the Criminally Insane in nearby Fulton. According to Ray, on his first day there he peered through the metal mesh on the bottom of his cell door and watched as attendants gave “a severe ass-kicking” to another inmate who had arrived with him.¹³ The next morning, as he lined up with other patients to have his first interview with a psychiatrist, he passed a glass-paneled door through which he saw a patient receiving electroshock treatment. “Although this type of treatment is not uncommon in mental asylums,” Ray later wrote, “seeing someone flopping around on a table with wires attached to his head can have an unsettling effect on one. Needless to say, when it came my turn to be interviewed by the Chief Bug Doctor, I no longer had an interest in being treated for a mental ailment.”¹⁴

Ray “came clean with the shrink” and confessed he was just there to try and beat his charge of attempted escape. The psychiatrist told him to stay out of trouble and “to mind my own business.”¹⁵ After two months a report was issued that found Ray competent to stand trial. It also showed that he tested with a 105 IQ, and that while he exhibited “no evidence of a psychosis,” he was a “sociopathic personality, antisocial type with anxiety and depressive features.”¹⁶

Six weeks after he was returned to Jeff City, Ray was examined by a prison psychiatrist, Henry Guhleman, for the upcoming parole hearing, which was still scheduled despite Ray’s escape attempts. In his report, Guhleman said, “Ray is an interesting and rather complicated individual.”¹⁷ Ray lied to Guhleman about his education (two years of high school), his military service (private first class and an honorable discharge), his love life (he lived briefly with different women), and his father (deceased). But he also seemed eager to talk about other matters, especially his recent physical ailments. He told Guhleman that during the past year he had suffered from pain in the “solar plexes,” tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), and severe “intracranial tension” (head pain). When Guhleman commented that Ray was using complex medical terms, James said he had been reading medical literature as he feared he might have cancer or heart trouble.¹⁸ Ray trusted Guhleman enough to tell him about his nightmares at the age of ten. He also described nervous habits he had recently acquired—when he felt anxious or afraid, he would put a glass of water on the table in front of him and move it back and forth until he felt better. To Guhleman, Ray’s “problem revolves around what appears to be an increasingly severe obsessive compulsive trend.… This is not psychotic in nature but severely neurotic.”¹⁹ Guhleman put Ray on Librium, an antidepressant and muscle relaxant. He also recommended against probation: “It is felt that he is in need of psychiatric help and that should any serious parole consideration be given, some type of psychiatric help should be considered.”20 Parole was denied.*

While undergoing his examination by Guhleman, Ray had asked for a new kitchen job but was assigned to pushing the food cart in the hospital ward. Since he now fretted that he had mononucleosis, he was actually happy to be in the hospital, where he could obtain a high-protein diet and “conserve my energies.”²¹ He also immediately noticed that “there was considerable trafficking in goof balls and other illicit drugs through the hospital.”²² This is the assignment, in late 1966 and early 1967, that put Ray in the same prison section with Dr. Hugh Maxey and the inmate John Paul Spica, men who may well have known about the St. Louis offer of a $50,000 bounty on Martin Luther King.

After several months there, Ray was transferred back to the bakery. Other inmates noticed that he now read books about Mexico and even borrowed a Spanish dictionary from a fellow prisoner.²³ Unknown to them, he was planning a new escape. There was talk among Jeff City inmates about the countries that were the easiest in which to obtain new identities and were also safe as hideouts.²⁴ George Edmundson, an inmate who had been on the FBI’s Top Ten list, was well known for having obtained a Canadian passport while on the run. He told the FBI that it was “very easy” to get one, and that the procedure was known to probably “every fugitive” in the United States.²⁵ According to Edmundson, all that was necessary was a guarantor, a baptismal or birth certificate, and a $5 fee. “Guarantors” were available among the “floaters, prostitutes and hustlers” in the Rue Notre Dame area of Montreal.²⁶

Ray had read an article about Lowell Birrell, a New York securities operator indicted for fraud, who had fled successfully to Brazil after obtaining a Canadian passport.²⁷ With another inmate, Ray discussed a newspaper article in which an Italian criminal escaped from the United States to Italy after obtaining a Canadian passport, which the article said was simple to get.²⁸ In conversations with other prisoners, Ray indicated he was aware of how to use baptismal records, newspaper archives, and city records to obtain certified copies of birth certificates.²⁹ At other times, he focused on Mexico as a good place to “hide out” or “cool off,” but other inmates argued with him, contending it would be easier for a white American to blend into Canada.³⁰ However, Ray did not abandon the idea of escaping to Mexico, indicating he had thought of trying to darken his eyes, and he once claimed to have experimented with staining his skin with a “walnut dye.”31

Ray planned his escape for early May, but fearing that a guard might have stumbled on to the plot, he moved the date to late April.³² On April 21, he bought a Channel Master transistor radio from the inmate canteen.*

On Saturday, April 22, 1967, the day before Ray implemented what would be a successful jail break, he was visited by his brother John.³³ Prison records reveal that John visited James eleven times at Jeff City, including the April 22 meeting. Jerry visited on five separate occasions.³⁴ It is probable that at that meeting John and James not only discussed the next day’s escape, but that John also provided James some last-minute assistance. When James fled Jeff City, he had a social security number (318–24-7098) in the name of John L. Rayns, a number and alias previously used by John.^†35 Nothing less would be expected of brothers so close that after the assassination John told a local newspaper, “James would do anything for us [John and Jerry], and we for him.”³⁶

However, despite the evidence, John has never admitted to even visiting James the day before his successful escape. His denials and obfuscation provide a fine example of the Ray family at its dissembling best, gathering its defenses to ensure that no member provides useful information about another to law enforcement. It is also useful in judging the credibility of John’s and Jerry’s later denials of assisting James while he was a fugitive or in the period leading up to the King assassination.

Two weeks after the assassination, John told the FBI that he had not seen his brother in four years, and that before that visit, he had not seen him in fifteen years.^‡37 A few days later, he changed his story slightly and admitted to two or three visits to Jeff City, but still denied seeing James the day before the escape.³⁸ When confronted with the prison records by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, John unconvincingly claimed, “I do not have no recollection of that.”³⁹ When the committee produced an interview with James in which he had acknowledged that “one of my brothers visited a couple of days before I escaped.… I believe it was John,” a visibly flustered John said, “I don’t deny it, no, I just said I don’t recall it.”40 At another point he suddenly claimed that maybe Jerry had visited James at the prison and used his name, but Jerry shot that one down, telling the committee, “I positively didn’t visit him.” John got so flummoxed in maintaining his denials that he even once claimed he was not certain if he ever knew that James had escaped from Jeff City. “I can’t recall being aware [of James’s escape],” said John. “It’s possible, but I can’t recall of being aware. I can’t remember him escaping.”⁴¹

One of James’s former accomplices, Walter Rife, was imprisoned with John at Leavenworth after the King assassination. There, John confided in Rife that he had assisted James by picking him up on a highway outside the prison.⁴² When confronted with that statement, John did not directly deny it, but rather accused Rife of “being a more or less a certified liar.”⁴³ It is not surprising that the Select Committee’s final report concluded that John’s “responses were inherently incredible, excellent examples of the obstructionist posture [he] assumed throughout the investigation.”*⁴⁴

While John persistently tried to keep the truth from investigators, James also lied about the escape for nearly a decade. In 1968, he wrote to author William Bradford Huie and maintained that he had escaped from Jeff City by merely scaling the wall—he was adamant that he did not have the aid of family members or other prisoners.⁴⁵ Huie, despite some suspicions that Ray was lying in order to protect those who had helped him, published that version in Look in November 1968.⁴⁶ Prison officials were skeptical that Ray had managed to scale a twenty-three-foot wall in broad daylight without being spotted. Finally, in Ray’s eighth interview with House Select Committee investigators in December 1977, he revealed that two inmates, whom he refused to identify, did assist in his escape.⁴⁷

What actually happened was that on Sunday, April 23, Ray was working in a section of the bakery responsible for packing bread loaves into a three-by-four-foot metal box with a hinged lid.^† A truck would arrive, pick up the box, and then take it to the prison’s honor farm.48 It was a daily routine, and depending on the needs at the farm, up to one hundred loaves were put inside.⁴⁹ Ray’s plan was to have an accomplice place him inside the box and then cover him with enough bread so it would pass through the normal checks. Once outside the prison gates, when the truck slowed at an intersection, Ray would jump from the rear.

The planning for this escape was thorough and demonstrates how Ray had matured in his seven years at Jeff City—the impetuous and inept prisoner had transformed into a patient and calculating one. To ensure that the guard did not touch him if he reached into the loaves of bread, Ray had fashioned a false bottom and ventilated the sides of the box so he could easily breathe.⁵⁰ Worrying that his prison uniform—dark green pants with a large black stripe down the leg—would quickly identify him as a fugitive, he managed to get a pair of plain black pants from a member of the prison band.⁵¹ Finally, he connived with several inmates to arrange that if he was successful, a well-known informant would be slipped the word that Ray had not made it out and that instead he was still hiding somewhere inside Jeff City. The hope was that such a ruse would keep the guards searching within the walls, thereby giving Ray the chance to get a decent distance away.

“At about eight o’clock on the morning of April 23, 1967 I entered the kitchen,” Ray wrote. “I normally took breakfast there rather than in the dining room, although I didn’t start work until eleven o’clock. After cleaning up about a dozen eggs (I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from), I waited for my accomplice’s pre-arranged signal indicated the coast was clear to enter the bread storage room.”⁵² Ray carried a sack containing twenty candy bars, a comb, a razor and blades, a small mirror, soap, and his recently purchased radio.⁵³ Since prisoners were allowed to shower and shave in the kitchen’s bathroom, the sack did not attract attention.

Everything was ready. Ray climbed into the bread box and covered himself with the false bottom, and the loaves were then stacked on top of him.

Normally the box was checked by both the driver and a guard at the prison’s security tunnel. Because it was a Sunday, the regular driver and guard were off.⁵⁴ Although the relief driver, Alfred Burkhardt, thought it strange that the box was already sitting on the loading dock when he arrived, he allowed two inmates to load it into the rear of the truck without searching to ensure it contained only bread.⁵⁵ At the tunnel, the relief guard lifted the cover, saw the loaves neatly packed, and waved Burkhardt through.⁵⁶ As the truck left the prison compound, Ray pushed away the bread, pulled himself out of the box, and hurriedly changed from his prison uniform into the black pants. By the time he finished, the truck had passed through all the stoplights it would encounter between the prison and the honor farm. Ray feared he would either have to jump from the truck at 45 miles per hour or be captured at the farm.

“Fortunately,” he later wrote, “my dilemma was resolved when the truck stopped briefly at the gravel road that led to the farm in order to let some oncoming cars pass. I leapt to the ground. Not wanting to look like a desperado, I casually waved toward the driver when I straightened up, as if I’d just been a civilian hitching a ride. Whether the wave worked or he didn’t see me, he roared on toward the farm.”57

When the truck arrived at the honor farm, only thirty loaves were found inside, all so smashed that they had to be fed to the chickens.*⁵⁸ Ray’s ploy—letting officials at Jeff City get word from an informant that he was hiding out inside—worked. Warden Swenson had guards search for him for two days within the prison’s labyrinth.⁵⁹ Inmates were forbidden to take food out of the eating area because officials thought they might be taking it to Ray.⁶⁰

The prison bureaucracy was slow and inefficient in acting on a successful escape. Finally, on April 25, a flyer was issued with a routine reward listed for a prisoner of no notoriety—$50. The notice listed three possible contacts: John Ray of 1918 Park Avenue, St. Louis (an address of his father’s junk store, sold several years earlier); Mary Maher, James’s grandmother, who had died three years earlier; and Jerry Ray, with a correct address in Wheeling, Illinois. The fingerprints attached to the notice were the wrong ones.^† The photograph of Ray—a thin man with a crew cut and a sour expression—bore little resemblance to him. Officials were so slow to search Ray’s cell to check for possible clues that it had already been emptied by inmates who had learned of the escape.⁶¹ But Ray did not need the inefficiency of Jeff City’s officials to complete his getaway. By the time the $50 reward was posted for his capture, James Earl Ray was well on his way to freedom and the comfort of his family.

* In 1962, Ray had acted as his own attorney in appealing his conviction to the Missouri Supreme Court. His petition was denied. But Ray, who was indigent, then had a lawyer appointed and the appeals process started again.

* Ray’s inability to get the facts right about his own life persist at almost every stage. In his book Who Killed Martin Luther King? he places the escape in the wrong year, 1965. He does, however, get the year right in his first book, Tennessee Waltz.

^† When Ray was captured, he was carrying a bag stuffed with assorted pills. He omits this from his own three-page version of his escape in Who Killed Martin Luther King?

* It is important to decode the technical language of both the Fulton and Guhleman reports. Those were completed by prison psychiatrists, accustomed to examining antisocial individuals often beset with extreme mental problems. For those psychiatrists to conclude that Ray was not psychotic merely means he was not outright crazy within the meaning of Missouri State Code 552.010, and that he could still function within the prison system. However, the diagnoses that he was a “sociopathic personality” and “severely neurotic” mean he was acutely sick as to how he related to the rest of society.

* When inmates purchased radios from the canteen, their prisoner numbers were etched onto the side of the small portables. Ray’s number, 00416, was put there when he bought it.

^† James incredibly claimed in his letters to author William Bradford Huie that he remembered the number from a time he used it once in 1951. Yet he had evidently never used the name or alias in the intervening years before his escape. Given Ray’s poor recall of many events in his life, it is almost certain that his claim of remembering the nine-digit number for sixteen years is a lie.

^‡ Jerry Ray was not much more truthful than John. Despite his five visits to James in Jeff City, and having seen James after his escape in 1967, Jerry originally told the FBI that he had last seen James in 1964 (MURKIN 3334–3335, section 35).

* John himself may have inadvertently given the best indication of his own involvement when he wrote a letter to George McMillan in 1973 in which he said that James had been given identification and access to a car upon his escape—“the person who went and help him, also is doing time now in a federal prison for a charge that I expect is a frame-up.” At the time he wrote the letter, John was in a federal penitentiary for a bank robbery conviction, one he always contended was an FBI frame-up. Later, John admitted to the assassinations committee in executive session that he was talking about himself when he wrote the letter, but he claimed he had fabricated the story of assistance.

^† Ray escaped only four days before the Missouri Supreme Court was to hear the long-standing appeal of his 1959 robbery conviction. Evidently, he had little faith in obtaining a reversal or he might have waited for the court’s decision before trying to escape.

* As a result of Ray’s escape, Jeff City changed the size of its bread boxes so that they were too small to hide anyone. Many inmates refused to believe that Ray had escaped inside the box, and a commonly told story was that he had arranged to “buy” a guard’s uniform and simply walked out the prison’s front door.

^† Some researchers have focused on the error of the wrong fingerprints to charge that Ray was released from prison with the help of either the CIA or FBI, with the long-range intent that he play a decoy role in the plot to kill King. German writer Joachim Joesten, in his self-published book The Greatest Police Fraud Ever: The James Earl Ray Hoax, is typical when he writes, “Ray did not escape from prison, he was surreptitiously let out with the consent of the Warden who went so far as to circulate to police authorities a false set of fingerprints designed to foil any chance recapture of the ‘fugitive.’” Actually, the error was detected by fingerprint experts in Kansas City only two weeks after Ray’s escape, and Warden Swenson immediately ordered corrected ones re-sent.