Indian Trail
Once outside the prison, thinking the police would expect him to head immediately for St. Louis, where his brothers lived, Ray instead started walking west toward Kansas City.1 Listening to his radio for news that never arrived about his escape, he walked for six days.2 He ate candy bars, drank spring water, broke into a trailer once to steal some food, and suffered from badly swollen and blistered feet.3 Finally, deciding “the heat is off now,” he rode a freight train toward his brothers, where “I call a friend [former crime partner Jack Gawron] who takes me to a small town [Edwardsville] out of East St. Louis where I catch the bus to Chicago.”4 “I didn’t see any of my relatives,” Ray contended.*5
On April 30, one week after his escape, Ray checked into a $12-a-week rooming house in Chicago and registered under the alias John Larry Rayns, the name he had gotten from his brother.†6 Mrs. Donnelly, the co-owner, remembered Ray “had foot trouble when he came here. He could hardly walk for several days.”7 She and her husband said Ray was nice, quiet, and tidy.8 On May 3, he saw an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune offering a $94-a-week job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, the Indian Trail. Located just north of Chicago in the affluent suburb of Winnetka, the Indian Trail was a large family-style restaurant, a local institution for about thirty-five years. It was also convenient to Jerry, who lived and worked as a $113-per-week night handyman at the Sportsman Country Club less than ten miles away.*9
Ray arrived on May 4, gave his alias John L. Rayns, and landed the dishwasher job. Three days later he began work in the rear of the enormous kitchen. Of seventy-eight employees, twenty-seven were black and four Filipino, and none of them recalled any animosity from James. They remembered him fondly as an industrious, quiet, and polite person.10 The owners, in a report on his work habits, concluded that he was “a reliable man of excellent potential for food service industry.”11 After a few days, he was promoted to “food server,” and his pay jumped to $117.50.
Gertrude Struve Paulus, one of the owners, had helped Ray when he first arrived by showing him how to bind his injured feet to relieve the pain. Paulus had lived in Germany as a youngster and spoke with Ray about Bremerhaven. But she found him reticent. “He seemed lonely and shy,” she recalled. “And once or twice I kidded him about the girls. But he didn’t like it. He was not a man who liked the girls. I recognized that in him.”12 But Ray’s apparent lack of interest in women was actually part of his new self-discipline, something he had evidently learned while at Jeff City. “There’s nothing strange about me not looking for a woman in Chicago,” he said, “I had waited seven years so I could wait a few weeks longer. A woman is a risk for a fugitive. She might report you to the police. And a woman costs money, and I was trying to accumulate capital as fast as I could without risking a holdup.”13 Ray boasted to Huie that while he was in Chicago, “I wasn’t taking dope, staying drunk, and hunting prostitutes.”14
Henry Johnson, a cook’s helper, often drove Ray to the bus stop after work, and remembered him as a shy man who avoided personal questions and almost always seemed to be reading a newspaper. While Ray was employed at the Indian Trail he would likely have read the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of Martin Luther King’s early May criticism of General Westmoreland, the June 12 story that the Supreme Court had upheld King’s 1963 conviction for violating an Alabama injunction, and the June 18 challenge by King that the black movement for equality had entered a more difficult phase that will “cost the nation something.”
By his own account, Ray had roughly $300 when he escaped from Jeff City. His willingness to work at the Indian Trail suggests that his brothers had not yet returned to him any money he had sent them from prison for safe-keeping. For a man who had refused to move to an integrated honor farm at Leavenworth, the mixed-race kitchen could not have been pleasant. Moreover, the work was hard, the pay little, and there is nothing in Ray’s past to indicate that if he had enough money he would have stuck with such menial work.
Ray initially stayed away from his family because he mistakenly believed that the authorities were conducting a painstaking search for him and probably watching them.15 That was because he had an inflated view of how important a fugitive he was. The same newfound self-discipline that kept him from going with any women in the weeks after his escape also meant that he would not risk contacting his family until he was satisfied that the FBI was not monitoring them.
After a week of freedom, he called Jerry and asked “if the police were around surveilling.”*16 Another week passed and the two brothers had a quick drink at a local bar.17 It gave James more confidence that the FBI might not be following his family, but still he kept his distance and, therefore, a low profile. “Usually I drank two cans of beer every night in my room,” he recalled. “I read The Chicago Tribune, listened to the transistor radio, and sometimes read murder mysteries or books about Canada and Latin America. Naturally, most of my thinking was about how to live outside the U.S.”18 Also, Ray frequented a local bar on Diversey Street. While he had returned to moderate drinking, there is no evidence that he had resumed his amphetamine binges.
As the weeks passed with no sign of the FBI or local police, the brothers began relaxing. At the Indian Trail, none of the employees remembered James receiving any telephone calls until his last week, when he got three or four. Some employees thought he seemed excited by those calls, while others thought he appeared disturbed and distracted.19 Two of the restaurant’s owners, Harvey and Clara Klingeman, remembered that the male voice on the other end of the telephone identified himself as James’s brother.20 This was also the time when some visitors arrived at the restaurant’s rear door and waited to talk to James outside.*21 Jerry admits that he was one of James’s visitors at the Indian Trail.22 James also visited Jerry for drinks near the country club where Jerry worked.23
It was around this time—five to six weeks after the escape—that the three brothers may have held a meeting first reported by author George McMillan. According to Jerry Ray, the three gathered at Chicago’s Atlantic, a historic hotel that had degenerated into a crumbling skid-row haven by 1967.† It was the first time in twenty years that the brothers were all out of jail at the same time. They settled into separate rooms under false names and paid cash so the hotel’s records could not confirm the visit. The next morning they met and discussed several possibilities to get some money, said Jerry, including kidnapping then-governor Otto Kerner or Jack Brickhouse, a local star broadcaster, or even a wealthy member of the country club where Jerry worked. They also toyed with the idea of going into the porn business—something James showed great interest in—but they could not agree on anything.*24
Then James surprised both of them. “I’m going to kill that nigger King,” he calmly said. “That’s something that’s been on my mind. That’s something I’ve been working on.” Jerry thought the job far too dangerous and ambitious—he says he flatly told James he would not help him. John also opted out: “That’s crazy! You can count me out of that deal. There ain’t no money in killin’ a nigger. I’m going back to St. Louis.”25 If James knew of a bounty on King, he evidently did not share it with his brothers at that time.
Before they departed, John and Jerry made an accounting to James of the money he had sent from prison. The amount is not certain. In Jerry’s first version, James received $4,600, and $1,500 was held in reserve in case of any emergency.26 At other times, he gave James $2,200, then $1,200, and even once said it was only $110.27 Subsequently, James’s only noticeable expenditure was $100 for a 1960 Chrysler.28 Whatever the amount, James felt secure enough to leave the Indian Trail, which he did on June 25.†29
John and James have since denied there was such a meeting, but Jerry’s reaction when confronted by House Select Committee investigators suggests otherwise. Normally, when asked about things he had told author George McMillan, Jerry claimed that either they were false or spoken in jest, or that McMillan had concocted them. However, when quizzed about this critical meeting where James expressed interest in killing King, Jerry surprisingly did not initially deny it. Instead, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Although the Select Committee had granted him immunity in order to compel his testimony, he was not exempt from a perjury prosecution.30 “I don’t remember,” Jerry said, visibly nervous. “I am going to have to invoke the Fifth Amendment on all this stuff because I can’t remember all this stuff and this has been going on since 1968 with McMillan.”31 Later, when pressed, Jerry claimed, “I am saying I don’t remember saying anything like that.”32 Eventually, he followed the lead of James and John and denied that the meeting took place.
Three days after James left the Indian Trail, he wrote a letter to the restaurant’s owners informing them that he had quit because “I have been offered a job on a ship so will take it.” Ray asked them to send his last check to his brother Jerry.33
Ray left Chicago for Quincy, where he spent the next three weeks unemployed and traveling to his childhood haunts of Quincy, Alton, and East St. Louis. He stayed in a series of cheap motels, usually costing $1.50 per night.34 As might be expected, he has not been very forthcoming in identifying the people he saw while there. He told Huie in 1968, “I can’t give anyone information that would lead to the prosecution of anyone else. I think you can understand that in short I don’t want to burn any bridges and I think I owe something to those who have helped me in the past.”35
One of his former inmates at Jeff City, James Carpenter, ran into him in St. Louis in early May, and over a beer Ray mentioned that he needed a gun in case he had to pull a robbery. Carpenter was unable to help.36 James saw an old friend, Ted Crawley, who owned a local Quincy tavern, and Jerry said that it was there that James arranged to get a pistol.37 James later admitted to obtaining a .38-caliber revolver during this time, but claimed he had gotten one free from his friend Jack Gawron.*38
As he felt safer, he more openly visited his family, at least Jerry, occasionally seeing him at two of Jerry’s local hangouts, the Northbrook Bar and the Cypress Tavern.39 The one person Ray evidently did not run into was James Owens, his accomplice on the Kroger robbery that finally landed him in Jeff City with a twenty-year sentence. His brother John said that if Ray had found Owens, he would have killed him on sight since he blamed him for the Kroger arrest.40
However, despite the ease with which he moved around these river towns he knew so well, Ray had no intention of staying there very long. He was determined to leave the country, and had taken the advice of other prisoners to try Canada first. While at the Indian Trail, he had written to the Canadian consul asking how he might emigrate to Canada.41 When he left Mrs. Donnelly’s rooming house in Chicago, he had told her that “he had to go to Canada on business.”42
While James was in East St. Louis on July 13, nearly three weeks after he quit his Indian Trail job, the Bank of Alton—twenty miles away—was robbed of $27, 230 by two shotgun-wielding, masked gunmen.43 Besides James, John and Jerry were also in the area that day. It was Jerry’s day off from his country club job. John was suspected of being involved in five similar local bank robberies in a two-year span, all with a similar modus operandi.*44 Did the three Ray brothers pull that heist? The FBI—trying to establish where Ray had obtained the funds he used while a fugitive—investigated the Alton robbery, as well as other unsolved cases, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. In addition to the Ray brothers, at least fifteen other people were considered suspects at some point.45 The Bureau could never positively link the Rays to the robbery.46
The House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted a more extensive investigation of whether the Rays robbed that bank. There is, as the Select Committee concluded, “substantial, albeit circumstantial” evidence that the Rays were the perpetrators of the unsolved crime.†47
The two thieves, described by witnesses as middle-aged white men similar in height and build to James and John Ray, left the bank and evidently a getaway car was waiting for them. Instead of taking a direct route out of town, the robbers actually headed deeper into Alton, indicating some familiarity with the town and confidence in their ability to elude the police while there. The shotgun and the clothing they used were found abandoned only several hundred yards from the home of Willie Maher. Their mother, as well as James, had previously had homes in the same neighborhood. Jerry Ray, in a critical admission to one committee witness (who asked for anonymity), privately confided that James and John had indeed robbed the Alton bank.48 (Jerry, typically, later denied making the statement.)
The actions of James and John immediately after the Alton robbery indicate that both brothers had suddenly come into cash. The day after the robbery, James spent $210 for a 1962 red Plymouth, and the following day he left for Canada.49 Within a few weeks, John abruptly abandoned the Midwest for California and Mexico. When he returned to Missouri in late summer, he deposited $2,650 to two St. Louis bank accounts.50 Although John claimed the money came from honest work in California, he could not substantiate a single job he had there.*51
Not surprisingly, all three brothers have publicly denied any role in the Alton bank robbery, although none had a verifiable alibi for the time of the heist.52 Jerry Ray, seizing the drama in almost any situation, actually followed his Select Committee testimony with a trip to the Alton police station, where he offered to waive any statute of limitations and turn himself in. The police turned him away, saying he was not a suspect.
It is quite possible that the Rays, or at least John and James, were involved in the Alton robbery, and the success of the heist would again explain much of the money James used in the year leading up to the assassination. His departure for Canada was not unexpected, since he had been talking about leaving the States for some time, but it is suspicious that it happened right after the bank robbery, which would have netted his largest haul ever.
* Ray gave the House Select Committee a second, conflicting version of his arrival in East St. Louis, saying that he had tried to reach Gawron but he was not home, forcing Ray to take a ten-mile taxi ride to the bus station. However, Ray knew nothing about the taxi route or the approximate fare, indicating that his first version, in which Gawron gave him a ride, was correct.
† In the case of the rooming house’s owners, the Donnellys, author William Bradford Huie found them, as he did many others in the case, based on the notes and descriptions Ray provided to him as part of their postassassination exclusive writing deal. Huie had the advantage of locating those witnesses before even the FBI had talked to them, and in many instances, as with the Donnellys, they did not even realize that the man they had known was James Earl Ray, the accused assassin of Martin Luther King. All were shocked when Huie informed them of Ray’s real identity and the crime for which he had been arrested. But he invariably did so after the interviews, thereby ensuring his advantage that most of his interviewees were not biased by what they subsequently learned about Ray or heard about the assassination.
* FBI interviews with the country club’s owner, locker room manager, and other employees reveal that Jerry had a reputation as a harmless man who was not that bright. While there, he married a waitress, Gjirdis Anna D. Olsen, and she had a child from her previous husband while they were together. They were divorced eighteen months after their marriage. Olsen was also somebody that the club management thought was slow-witted.
* To the Select Committee, James admitted to at least three, and maybe four, meetings with Jerry. However, a decade earlier he had lied to author William Bradford Huie by claiming he had not seen any of his relatives when he returned home. He was, of course, protecting them at the time, since the statute of limitations on harboring a fugitive had not yet expired. “My reason for not seeing any relatives is that criminal charges can be filed against a relative or anyone for harboring a fugitive if the police can prove it.”
* The FBI played tape recordings of voices, presumably Jerry and John Ray, for the restaurant owners and employees. But no one could identify them. There was a similar failure to recognize any photographs the FBI brought in an attempt to determine who Ray’s visitors were.
† In the version Jerry Ray gave McMillan, he said the meeting took place on April 24, the day after James’s escape. There had been an initial misunderstanding about where John was supposed to meet James—some forty miles outside the prison—but eventually James called, John picked him up, and the two drove to Chicago. However, that is clearly wrong. James had just started his six-day walk west from prison. The injury to his feet that came from so much walking was confirmed by witnesses both at his rooming house and at the Indian Trail restaurant where he worked. Also, James’s fear that the authorities were watching his family would have prevented him from arranging such an early rendezvous.
* In 1963, James’s younger brother Franklin died at the age of eighteen in a car crash near Quincy. Also killed in the crash was eighteen-year-old Virginia May Johnson. U.S. postal inspectors had found nude photographs they believed were of Johnson and traced them to a ring that sold explicit photos of young girls, operating out of 1913 Hickory Street in St. Louis, the boardinghouse owned by Mom Maher. Postal inspectors raided the house but found nothing, although they suspected that the porn ring was composed of John Ray and his younger brother Franklin. Interviews with other family members were not productive. “It was a close-mouthed family,” commented postal inspector H. M. McLaughlin, “all protecting each other.” After the deaths of Franklin Ray and Virginia Johnson, the investigation stalled, and no charges were ever filed.
† Ray had received eight paychecks totaling $813.66, and his net income after withholding taxes was $664.34. His expenses were low during that period, with his $12-a-week rent being his biggest one, probably leaving him between $500 and $550, apart from any monies his brothers may have given him.
* When Ray identified Gawron before the House Select Committee, Gawron had not only died, but had also testified in another case against Ray’s brother, John. It is likely that James used his name as a cover for whoever really provided him the pistol. Gawron, shortly after the assassination, denied to the FBI that he had seen Ray, since he feared being charged with harboring a fugitive.
* As Select Committee deputy chief counsel James Wolf concluded, “The participation of John Ray in all five bank robberies is supported by evidence, even though he was only convicted of the St. Louis, Mo., holdup.” The committee had statements from other criminals who admitted being part of the holdups and who also provided information about John Ray’s involvement.
† The FBI had received a statement from Jack Gawron that James Earl Ray and another man had pulled the Alton robbery (MURKIN 4760, section 62, pp. 21–29). However, the other man named by Gawron turned out to be in jail at the time of the robbery, and there were other inconsistencies in his story. The author does not give it any credence in deciding whether the Rays robbed the Alton bank.
* John held very few straight jobs through the 1960s. In his testimony before the Select Committee in December 1978, John was asked what employment he had in April 1967, when James escaped from Jeff City. He said, “I can’t—I can’t—I believe I was a painter.” He could not provide the name of the contractor who supposedly employed him (MURKIN 4760, section 62, p. 201). Just before his committee testimony, he had been arrested on suspicion of burglary. Many committee members suppressed laughter when Jim Lesar, his attorney, claimed that John had been arrested “when he wandered into a house by mistake.”