20

Gray Rocks

On July 15, 1967, Ray spent the night in Indianapolis before traveling to Canada.1 Two days later he registered under the name John L. Rayns at the Bourgard Motel in Dorion, about twenty-three miles outside Montreal. The following day he signed a six-month lease for a single room at the Har-K, a three-story collection of fifty-seven dingy apartments in a run-down industrial district of Montreal.² On the Har-K’s ground floor was a raucous nightclub, the Acapulco, advertised by an enormous flashing yellow and red neon sign promising ACAPULCO SPECTACLES. Ray signed that lease using a new name, Eric S. Galt.

Galt became Ray’s primary alias for the next nine months leading up to the assassination, and there has been much controversy over how Ray came by the name. There was a real Eric S. Galt who worked for Union Carbide and lived in Toronto.*³ The real Galt’s middle name was St. Vincent, and for a while he had an unusual way of signing it—he abbreviated it to “St.V.” and for the two periods drew small circles. It could look, at first glance, like StoVo. A few months after Ray first used the alias, he applied for an Alabama driver’s license, and when asked what the S stood for, he said, “Starvo,” raising the inference that Ray (or someone) may have seen the real Galt’s signature and misread it.4 Moreover, the real Galt lived in a Toronto neighborhood only a few miles away from three other people whose identities Ray would appropriate when he was on the run after the assassination. Ray and Galt also bore a passing resemblance to each other.*

Ray has said that he is positive he did not know there was a real Galt when he first selected the alias. He seemed positive about very little else, however, and has relished sowing confusion by presenting conflicting versions of when and how he chose that name. In 1968 he told Huie he had come up with it “about 3 or 4 years before I escaped,” but he testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, “I didn’t have no idea I’d use that name in Jeff City.” He soon suggested he found the name when he was working in Chicago, and then later changed that to Birmingham. (Impossible, since Ray used Galt before he ever visited Birmingham.⁵) As for how he found the name, he has, at various times, said he took it from a phone book, a magazine, an advertisement, or a book.⁶ When asked how he found the distinctive middle name, Starvo, he shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”^†7

Several researchers and authors have found innovative solutions. George McMillan said Ray selected the Galt alias from books he read while imprisoned at Jeff City. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged opens with the question “Who is John Galt?” and a villainous character named Ernst Stavro appears in the James Bond series.8 However, Ray later said, “I’m sure I didn’t get it out of there.”⁹ Author Clay Blair, Jr., thought it probable that Ray bought the name from “an underworld ring dealing in forged passports and papers.”¹⁰ However, in Ray’s first weeks in Canada, he earnestly tried to obtain a passport through legal channels. If he had located an illegal ring, he would have merely purchased a usable passport. Moreover, he had no documentation such as a driver’s license to go with the Galt name, false items that an underground ring would have provided along with the name. Finally, William Bradford Huie decided that when Ray drove into Canada he passed a road sign for the town of Galt—there is such a sign near Toronto—and later settled on the first name Eric when “seeking something different from the more common first names.”¹¹ Ray also contested Huie’s version—“that wasn’t the, the way I got the name. I’m positive of that.”¹²

The key question is whether Ray could have been given the name by a conspirator in the King assassination, even though the murder was nine months away. The mysterious person called Raoul, says Ray, directed almost all his actions in the year leading up to the assassination. Yet Ray arrived in Canada on July 15, and he used the Galt alias for the first time when he leased an apartment in Montreal three days later. In his own version, he did not meet Raoul for at least another week. Therefore, it was impossible for Raoul to have supplied the name Galt to Ray.*

No books, no criminal ring, no road sign, no conspirator. The only realistic alternatives are either that Ray developed the Galt identification on his own, during a brief stopover in Toronto, or that one of his brothers had found it earlier and passed it to him when he left for Canada.

Did Ray have an opportunity to get the name himself? In the 20,000 Words he sent to Huie in 1968, he wrote that while traveling to Montreal, “I stayed one night in Toronto.”13 Once in Toronto, he either stayed at a fleabag motel that accepted cash as the only necessary identification or slept in his car, something that he sometimes admittedly did.¹⁴ Although Galt was a quite traditional Canadian surname, there was only one Eric Galt in the Toronto telephone directory.¹⁵ As Ray told the Select Committee, he might have randomly selected Galt from the phone book. Since he used it first on July 18, it is likely he picked it up on July 16 when he stayed in Toronto.* Is it not possible that he stumbled across the unusual way Galt signed his name? From credit card slips to auto registrations left in cars, thieves like Ray are adept at finding a different name when one is needed. “I have used a lot of aliases,” Ray once admitted, “I can’t remember how many—probably fifteen or twenty or maybe more.”†¹⁶

There remains the possibility that John and Jerry Ray might have had the name ready for James before he left for Canada. Once he broke out of jail in late April, James did not leave the States for two months, giving them plenty of time to develop a usable name. Jerry told the author that he had been to Canada only once, in 1963, and it was to Toronto, where the real Galt lived.¹⁷ James himself had fled to Canada after a robbery in 1959, so the brothers knew it was a good place to “cool off.” The Rays also had a habit of gathering identifications from various places just in case they ever needed them. “I know around the home there,” James recalled, “we used to have 15 to 20 different social security cards.”18

The night before Ray signed the six-month lease at the Har-K apartments as Galt, he said that he drove into one of Montreal’s red-light districts. He paid $25 to a prostitute at a gambling club and went to an “apartment run by who ever she is working far.” After he finished with her, he noted the address as he left.¹⁹ The next night, after Ray had settled into his new one-room apartment, he drove back to the club and again picked up the same girl. He paid her another $25 at her apartment, had sex with her, and then “we were ready to leave and I put the gun on her and took her to the office.”²⁰ Ray forced his way in and bound the pimp’s hands and feet with the prostitute’s stockings. “After a little persuasion” (presumably beating the pimp), Ray was told where they hid the money—in a cabinet—and found $1,700 there. He told the girl to get under the bed and then fled the scene.²¹

The reason he waited to get to Canada to pull his first solo crime, said Ray, was “that if I would have been caught (in the U.S.) I would have had to do time plus what I had left in Missouri. If I would have been caught in Canada they would have just sent me back to the U.S. Also, by robbing a brothel, I figured they mite not of called the police.”²²

An armed robbery entailed a fair amount of risk for a fugitive, and Ray would only have undertaken it if he desperately needed money. It is possible, however, that Ray invented the whorehouse heist to cover his involvement in the Alton bank robbery just five days before. He cannot recall the name of the Montreal club he supposedly robbed, has given conflicting amounts for what he stole, and has changed the dates, and indeed, no robbery that even remotely fit his description was ever reported.* What is significant, nevertheless, is that the day after he says he robbed the brothel, Ray went on a spending spree, most of it to create a new and sophisticated identity. On July 19, he spent about $200 for a dark brown suit, a pair of gray trousers, and some ties, T-shirts, underwear, pajamas, and swimming trunks at Tip Top Tailors. It was the first suit he ever owned. Later that day he got a haircut and had his nails manicured at the ornate Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Two days later, he ordered a tailor-made suit from the English and Scotch Woolen Company. He next bought a small television set and several books on hypnosis.23

A few days after his shopping spree, Ray sent a Canadian money order to Futura Books in Inglewood, California, for three sex manuals.²⁴ According to the advertisement that Ray answered, the books dealt with such issues as “sex impulse in men vs. women; masturbation in and out of marriage; precoital stimulation; problems of sexuality; frustrated wives with case histories; sex myths; aids to penetration; oral eroticism; enlarging the penis to a maximum; assistance in overcoming premature ejaculation, etc.” The sex manuals were evidently part of Ray’s “research” for the women he soon hoped to meet. He also purchased another Canadian money order and sent it to the Locksmithing Institute in Little Falls, New Jersey, as a $17.50 first payment on a mail-order course.²⁵ Although he later said there was “no particular reason” for taking the correspondence locksmithing course, he admitted that he “might do something illegal.… I didn’t specifically have in mind learning to be a burglar at that age, but at the same time you could always use something like that when nothing else is available.”²⁶ Locksmithing was, as he later put it, “a trade for which I’d always felt an affinity.”²⁷

But Ray was preoccupied with something else during his early stay in Montreal. When he had first arrived in Canada, he decided, “One thing was certain: I never in my life intended to return to the United States. What hope was there for me back there? The first thing I did in Montreal … was call a travel agency and ask what I.D. was necessary to get a passport.… I was never going to cross that border back into the United States.”²⁸ Ray dreamed of moving to South America, Spain, Australia, or even an English-speaking country in Africa.²⁹ However, the travel agency gave him the wrong information, telling him that while he did not need any identification, he needed a guarantor to swear that he or she had known him for two years.30 “Later [after the assassination] I found out this wasn’t true,” Ray recalled, “you can get a Canadian passport simply by swearing you are a Canadian citizen, and you don’t need anybody else to swear with you. But right then I thought I needed somebody else, so I began looking.”³¹

His haunt for his first eleven days became the waterfront—about thirty blocks from his apartment—where some six thousand ships a year docked, and hundreds of seamen arrived daily.³² The Montreal waterfront, in addition to being one of North America’s most active ports, had a well-deserved reputation in the 1960s as a major thoroughfare for illegal contraband and was the entry point for the heroin pipeline run by the now-defunct “French Connection” from Marseilles. It was there, in the waterfront’s rough bars and the local merchant seaman’s club, Mariners House, that Ray hoped to find a job on a ship (he had optimistically told his employers at the Indian Trail in Chicago that he had left to go to sea). He loitered around the wharves trying to educate himself about obtaining seaman’s papers, and at times he shadowed sailors in the hope he might “possibly roll a drunk” for his papers.³³ He tailed two or three, but never found the right victim.³⁴

One of Ray’s hangouts was the Neptune Tavern at 121 West Commissioners Street. It was narrow and dark, filled with massive oak furniture, the only lights dangling from pilot’s wheels suspended from the ceiling, and a giant pilot’s wheel dominating the rear of the bar. A sign welcomed all seamen and promised a generous exchange rate for English money, and a chalkboard listed the day’s small menu. It was there, after three or four nights, that Ray says he “sort of let the word get around” that he had had a little trouble in the States, was looking for ID and money, and just might be available for activities that didn’t involve too much risk.³⁵ As a result of those feelers, Ray says he met a man he calls Raoul, who over a series of meetings supposedly offered him the possibility of “travel documents” if Ray helped “take some packages across the border.”³⁶ Ray assumed that Raoul, who he said had wavy hair and wore suits with open-necked shirts, was Spanish because he had a slight accent. He never learned Raoul’s last name.*

According to Ray, after several tentative meetings with Raoul at the Neptune, he decided not to accept his offer of travel documents in exchange for some border smuggling. Instead, Ray decided to try to find a woman who might vouch that she had known him for two years.37 He called a local travel agency, which recommended that a single man might want to visit the Gray Rocks Inn, a stunning mountain resort widely known to vacationers for its beauty and sports, including golf, boating, swimming, and winter skiing.³⁸

Ray’s purchase of good clothes two weeks earlier, including his first suit, now seem part of his effort to find that “respectable Canadian woman” who would be willing to lie for him.³⁹ His trip to Gray Rocks was the next phase of his plan. If he had truly met a Raoul at the Neptune—someone who held out the easy promise of a passport for some help in smuggling—it is unlikely that Ray would have still pursued cultivating a woman to do his bidding. Considering that he had never had much previous success with women and his relationships with them were mostly limited to half-hour stints in run-down whorehouses, it was not a plan with which Ray could have felt very confident. The easier choice would clearly have been opting for Raoul’s criminal deal. The fact that he set off for Gray Rocks means there was likely no such offer on the table.*

Ray paid the travel agency $153 for the minimum board for a week, and on Sunday, July 30, he drove in his red Plymouth the eighty miles along the Laurentian auto-route. His room had a spectacular view of the Laurentian Mountains, and while Ray knew his battered Plymouth “wasn’t exactly gigolo material,” he hoped that his new clothes might make him stand out to the resort’s single women.⁴⁰ His first six days were uneventful, but on his last evening he met a very attractive brunette in her late thirties, Claire Keating.^†41 Keating was a sophisticated career woman who had recently taken her first steps to get a divorce from a troubled marriage. She was spending a long weekend with a girlfriend at a nearby resort in St. Jovite. On Saturday, August 5, the two women attended an auto race at Mont Tremblant, and that evening went to Gray Rocks to “mingle with people.”42 There, in the Gray Rocks lounge, Keating recalled, “was this lone man sitting at a table. He was neat, well-dressed, and shy. I guess it was his shyness that attracted us. My friend said, ‘Let’s sit with this man,’ and we introduced ourselves and sat down and ordered drinks and began to talk.”⁴³ She found Eric was “a nice man” who “listened and didn’t talk much.” Keating liked that he “was not a take-charge guy.… He was so unaggressive. All around us were aggressive men, trying to paw you and take you to their cars or rooms. Eric wasn’t that way. He wasn’t loud or boastful. He spent his money generously, but not wastefully, and he made nothing of it.”⁴⁴ At one point she cautioned him against spending too much, and “he sort of smiled and said, ‘There’s more where that came from.’”⁴⁵

They drank and danced, Ray moving clumsily about the floor, and she tried to show him some steps. Instead of being bothered by his awkwardness, she found his “lost-and-lonely manner” endearing. As the night wore on, she noticed that “he seemed to become more confident” and quietly warned off other men who made plays for her. He told her he was from Chicago. “He said he worked with his brother in some sort of business,” she recalled. “In fact, he was meeting his brother in Montreal the next day.”⁴⁶

They spent the night together in Ray’s room at Gray Rocks, and she found him “perfectly normal, nothing unusual.” She, of course, had no idea that it was the first time Ray had had sex with a woman other than the seediest of prostitutes in almost twenty years. It is hard to imagine the impact on Ray of his success with Keating. The man who had spent ten of the last twelve years in tough prisons, who had recently worked as a dishwasher earning less than $100 a week, was now cavorting at one of Canada’s finest resorts with a woman who would have been the envy of many men. Ray was no longer passing himself off as a small-time ex-con from a poor white trash background, but instead as Eric Starvo Galt, a well-dressed businessman with access to ready money. He was living the life he had often read and thought about while in prison. If anything, the encounter with Keating at Gray Rocks must have been a strong impetus for Ray to maintain his new lifestyle at all costs, a vivid reminder that the last thing he wanted was to be arrested as a fugitive and sent back to Jeff City to serve the remainder of his twenty-year sentence.

Keating lived in Ottawa, but she and her girlfriend planned to visit Expo ’67 in Montreal on their way home. On Sunday, August 6, Ray told them he had to rush back to Montreal for the meeting with his brother.⁴⁷ The next day, he called Keating and gave her his address at the Har-K apartments. Ray, Keating, and her girlfriend spent that evening at the Acapulco Club on the ground floor of the building. As she had at Gray Rocks, she tried to teach him some Latin dance steps, but on this night he did not seem so lighthearted. “He seemed much more serious,” noted Keating, “perhaps worried. He told me he wanted to come to Ottawa and talk to me about a serious matter.”48 During dinner that night, they got around to talking about blacks. “I can’t remember how the subject came up,” Keating later told author William Bradford Huie. “But he said something like ‘You got to live near niggers to know ’em.’ He meant that he had no patience with the racial views of people like me who don’t ‘know niggers’ and that all people who ‘know niggers’ hate them.”*⁴⁹

That night Ray, Keating, and her friend slept across his bed in the small one-room apartment. “The place was not Gray Rocks,” recalled Keating. “It was seedy and run-down, and Eric was embarrassed about it. When I left him next day, he said he would telephone, and he told me again that he was coming to Ottawa to talk about the serious matter. He was very serious.”⁵⁰ Ray had obviously decided that Claire Keating was the right woman to ask about vouching for his Canadian passport application. But he was nervous, as he later wrote, about approaching her. “I didn’t want to ask her too direct since she mite go to the police.”⁵¹

But Ray did not drive to Ottawa for another eleven days. During this time he says he tried unsuccessfully to get some travel documents or work on a ship, and that he also again met with Raoul at the Neptune. This second set of meetings supposedly produced a tentative agreement whereby Ray would smuggle some unspecified contraband across the border in exchange for a “small amount of money and a passport.”⁵² Raoul even told him that if this operation were successful, there would be more work for Ray in the States and in Mexico.⁵³

Ray, if he is to be believed, had made a relatively painless deal with his newfound friend—to take a few packages across the border in exchange for his coveted passport. However, again he left to see Claire Keating, determined this time to ask her to vouch for his passport. It would seem unlikely that Ray would pursue the passport through Keating if he had already reached an agreement with a Raoul-type character.

Instead, on August 18, he drove to Ottawa and checked into the Town and Country Motel. Ray tried to play on Keating’s sympathy by saying he was without his car, so she took hers and drove him around the capital, showing him some sites. At first he seemed fine, bragging a little that he was now working for his brother. He said that while there was not much to do, he was paid well, and money was not a problem, since he could always get some.54 But as they drove, she noticed he got quieter. “For a long period as we rode around,” she recalled, “or while we were together at the motel, he said nothing. He just looked at me, like he was trying to get up the nerve to say something. I showed him where I work.”⁵⁵

When she did, Ray remembered, “she pointed to a big office building with the Canadian flag flying on a pole out front. It was a government agency. So much for my passport scam.”⁵⁶

Ray did not show it, but he was terribly disappointed to learn that Keating worked for the Department of Transport in the Canadian government.⁵⁷ He was somber the rest of the day and they did not spend that night together. The next day he left, and she never saw him again.

Returning to Montreal on August 20, the fickle Ray reversed the promise he had made to himself five weeks earlier—that he would never return to the United States—and instead decided to go home. He settled inexplicably on Birmingham, Alabama—possibly since, as his brother John had admitted, Ray was a fervent supporter of then governor George Wallace. At least, if he had to return to the States, Ray had selected a state that better fit his politics and racial views. He later wrote to the English and Scotch Woolen Company, where his tailored suit was still being made, and asked them to send it to Birmingham care of Eric S. Galt at the general post office delivery.⁵⁸

The next day, August 21, Ray drove to Windsor, Ontario. “I stopped along the side of Highway 401 and buried the revolver.”⁵⁹ He did not want to take any chance that it might be found on a search at customs.

Raoul was waiting at the rail station with an attaché case, according to Ray. Raoul removed three packages—which Ray assumed contained narcotics—from the briefcase and stuffed them behind the rear seat of the Plymouth.⁶⁰ “He said he would meet me on the other side,” Ray claimed.⁶¹ When Ray successfully crossed through the tunnel, Raoul was there, took him to a side street, and retrieved the bags from behind the seat.* Then he directed Ray back to Canada, where he again met him, loaded a second batch of bags behind the seat, and told Ray to make the return trip to the States over the bridge.62 As for the second run, Ray “noticed the customs officer was shaking down about every other car.”⁶³ Remembering the portable television set he had previously bought in Montreal, he declared that, and although the agents searched his car, they did not find any contraband.⁶⁴ Ray used the name Rayns at customs since he had his driver’s license in that name.⁶⁵ After thirty minutes, and paying a $4.50 duty for the television, he was waved through by the customs officer.* “Raoul was a little nervous and wanted to know where I had been,” Ray wrote.⁶⁶ After Ray explained about the television, “he gave me $750.00 but told me he couldn’t as yet get any travel Documents.”⁶⁷ (Before the House Select Committee, Ray said Raoul paid him $1,500, and to CBS news anchor Dan Rather, he said it was $1,700 or $l,800.)⁶⁸

Raoul then made Ray a new offer. “If I would go along with him he would not only get me traveling Documents but also 10 or 12 thousand dollars.”⁶⁹ Raoul told Ray to “get rid of the car” and “go to Mobile, Alabama,” and that he wanted Ray “to take weapons into Mexico or help in some way, [but] he assured me it would be relative safe.”⁷⁰ There was every reason for Ray to say no. Since Raoul had just let Ray down on the all-important passport, there was certainly no guarantee that he would pay Ray any more money. Ray was a loner who preferred working by himself—he had complained bitterly that the only times he ended up in jail for long stretches were because he used accomplices. Ray says, though, that he instantly agreed to work for this virtual stranger. The only condition upon which he insisted was that since he suffered from allergies, the dampness on the Gulf Coast would bother him, and he preferred Birmingham to Mobile. Ray had been in Alabama when he briefly drove across it during his 1955 postal money order spree that landed him in Leavenworth.

Raoul agreed, and even promised to pay Ray’s living expenses in Birmingham, as well as buy him a new car. All Ray had to do was wait to receive correspondence care of general delivery in Birmingham. Before he departed, Ray claimed that Raoul even gave him a telephone number in New Orleans, which he was to call if he did not hear from Raoul for a long time.^†71

While there may be doubts about the key details of Ray’s Raoul story, it is possible that Ray might actually have latched on to a small group of smugglers in Montreal—“I’d known guys like Raoul for years,” Ray later wrote.72 When Dan Rather interviewed Ray in 1977, he said that he had met “some people” (emphasis added) involved in dope smuggling. Later, when the Select Committee confronted him with that important admission, he tried to backpedal by claiming, “I am not really too precise on the language.”⁷³ Ray had, in fact, smuggled goods in the Army, and later dealt drugs at Jeff City, so carrying a couple of packages of dope across the border would be worth the gamble if the price was right. An offer to make such a trip, combined with his failure to land a passport through Claire Keating, might have been enough to induce him to return to the States. Jerry Ray told author George McMillan that James had actually run into an ex–Jeff City inmate while he was in Montreal, and that inmate had supplied Ray with narcotics that he then ran between Montreal and Detroit. “The whorehouse robbery is bullshit,” said Jerry. “What he did was run dope. He had decided kidnapping was too risky.”⁷⁴

What is not contested is that Ray stayed at a motel—under the name Rayns—outside Gary, Indiana, on August 21, his first night back in the States. One day after he supposedly received money from Raoul, Ray was, by his own admission, in Chicago visiting his brother Jerry.⁷⁵ Was Jerry the brother whom James told Claire Keating he was meeting the next day in Montreal? Was he the brother whom James told Keating he was in business with and through whom money was no longer any problem? James claimed he did not tell Jerry “where I was going or anything.”⁷⁶ Knowing how close and trusting the relationship was between them, however, if there was a real Raoul, then James would almost certainly have told Jerry about his good fortune in plugging into a drug-smuggling ring that promised thousands of dollars for little work.⁷⁷

Jerry has admitted that he and James met at a local hotel on North Avenue. James again asked Jerry to go into the porn business, to join him on the trip to Birmingham, but Jerry begged off, even though he was impressed at how much money James had—close to $10,000.78 And most important, according to Jerry, his brother had not abandoned his idea that King should be killed. “Jimmy was going to Birmingham to take out citizenship papers in Alabama,” Jerry said. “He believed that if he killed King in Alabama, or if he killed him anywhere in the South, it would help him if he showed he was a resident of Alabama.… Of course, if he killed King in Alabama, he believed Wallace would eventually pardon him, not at first, but after a few years when things had cooled off.”⁷⁹

Jerry noticed that his brother seemed to be “getting caught up in the Wallace campaign. He was talking as much that night in Chicago about getting Wallace in as he was about rubbing King out. He had it in his head that it would help Wallace if King wasn’t around.”*⁸⁰

The following day, August 23, James gave his car to Jerry, telling him it was “hot” and that he should change the license plates. Jerry then drove him to the train station in Chicago, and Ray boarded a sleeper heading for Birmingham.⁸¹ He was settling back into America, and ready to call the Deep South home.

* Galt worked as a laboratory staffer, responsible for inspecting the company’s manufacturing of proximity fuses used in such military weaponry as air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and the like. Because of his position, he was required to have a security clearance, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had conducted the last one in 1961. Of course, the fact that Galt’s employment had a military connection has prompted some conspiracists to speculate—without any supporting evidence—that there was a military or intelligence connection to Ray’s aliases.

* Some claim that the real Galt bore a remarkable resemblance to Ray. That has raised concern that Ray had selected, or been given, a look-alike identification that would later mislead investigators in the hunt for King’s assassin. Actually, Galt was fourteen years older than Ray, and despite the overreaching efforts of writers such as Philip Melanson to say that Galt “had a rugged, youthful appearance and looked to be in his forties,” pictures of Galt from that time show he looked considerably older than Ray, who was thirty-nine. Although only an inch taller, and ten pounds heavier, he had a different hairline, a broader nose, and fatty bags under his eyes. No one could have visually confused the two men, but a verbal description—white, five-ten, 170 pounds—would have been similar. Also, some buffs even claim that Ray and Galt had matching scars. In fact, Ray’s Jeff City prison records do not list any distinguishing scars, and when asked by the Select Committee if he had any, Ray said, “None that I know of.” One that he had on his hand from a lawn mower accident years earlier had faded and was invisible (MURKIN x–125, section 1, p. 11).

^† Ray seems to enjoy the confusion he creates with his constantly changing answers. He also readily admits that at times he lies: “Do you know you are a liar?” a Playboy interviewer asked him in 1977. “Yes, I know that.” However, Ray has claimed he does so only if he is not under oath. For instance, when the House Select Committee asked him if he had been truthful in a long interview with CBS’s Dan Rather, Ray said breezily, “I don’t recall. I wasn’t under oath.” As for his Playboy interview, Ray said he “intended” it to be truthful but there may have been “certain inadvertent errors.” As to his cooperation with the Select Committee, Ray noted that for his eight prison interviews, totaling 1,700 pages of testimony, he had been assured by the committee’s counsel that “nothing I said would be under oath,” again implying there was a lower standard of truthfulness to the interviews that carried no perjury penalties. Once, when confronted with a direct contradiction between two versions of his 1967 escape from Jeff City, Ray asked the committee counsel, “Was I under oath when I told you the other part of it?” (HSCA vol. XI, p. 343).

* Ray’s latest lawyer, Dr. William F. Pepper, published a book, Orders to Kill, in 1995. In it, Pepper presents one of the most convoluted and complex assassination theories that has ever been printed, outlining a mammoth conspiracy that involved the White House, the CIA, the FBI, Canadian and British intelligence, the Memphis police, military intelligence, Green Berets, the National Guard, and the mafia, among others. (See Chapter 32 for a detailed discussion of his theory.) According to Pepper, the real Eric S. Galt was a “highly placed Canadian operative of U.S. army intelligence.” He even reproduces a photo of Galt that he claims was obtained covertly from a National Security Agency file about him. According to the NSA, there was never a preassassination file on Galt. Pepper says only that he obtained his information from an unidentified source, who allegedly told him “not to ask any questions.” As with all his “revelations,” the Galt information is not sourced, and is not supported by a single piece of corroborating evidence. Galt was dead, of course, by the time Pepper published his accusations, so there could be no action for libel.

* Why, though, if Ray had Galt’s name on the sixteenth in Toronto, did he revert to his old alias of John L. Rayns when he checked in the next night at the Bourgard Motel in Dorion? Some charge that if he had already settled on Galt, he would have used it in Dorion. Yet since Ray did not have supporting documentation for Galt, he could not use it everywhere. “The only instances I would use Rayns,” Ray said, “was when I’d go in the motel somewhere where you have to register with your license plate number.” He had to do that at the Bourgard and therefore used Rayns. The next day, in Montreal, he was not required to produce any documentation when he signed the six-month apartment lease, so there he christened the Galt alias. He paid $150 for the first and last month’s rent, and as Ray later said, “that was just the first step” in his efforts to establish a paper record for Eric S. Galt.

^† The author also checked the Toronto newspapers—the Star, the Telegraph, and The Globe and Mail—for the time Ray was there to see whether Galt was mentioned in any article. Ray could have read such an article and appropriated the identity that way, but there was no mention of Galt in the local press.

* Huie first published the account of the whorehouse robbery in Look in 1968, and quoted Ray as saying he had gotten only $800 from the robbery. Huie said Ray gave the lower sum to his then lawyers, the Haneses. However, Ray’s own letters to Huie state the amount was $1,700, and the $800 figure is likely a misunderstanding by Huie. Ray has varied the amount over the years, but only slightly—$1,600 to $1,700 to Dan Rather in 1977, and once $1,500 to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and another time $1,700 to the committee. Also, Ray had changed his story and later told both Hanes and Huie that he had not really robbed a whorehouse but instead it was a supermarket. No supermarket in Montreal reported a robbery on those days. Before the Select Committee in 1977, Ray reverted to his whorehouse version, claiming he had deliberately lied to his own attorneys and to Huie because he was sick of “giving attorneys information that attorneys give to book writers and the book writers would give it to the FBI.”

As for the issue of the robbery’s timing, Ray started spending heavily on July 19. In the 20,000 Words, he indicated that between his one night required to case the place, and the second night to rob it, the heist did not happen until the evening of the nineteenth, after he had already started freely spending. That meant he already had money with him when he arrived in Canada, fitting into his role in the Alton heist. However, before the Select Committee, Ray retold the story and moved the robbery up by one day, thereby eliminating any problem over the timing.

* Ray, as he is wont to do, has added to the mystery about Raoul over the years by giving different versions in his numerous recountings of the story to investigators, lawyers, journalists, authors, and conspiracy buffs. For somebody that he supposedly saw numerous times over a nine-month period, Ray is remarkably inconsistent in describing Raoul. According to Huie, Ray originally told his lawyers that Raoul was a thirty-five-year-old blond Latin, and then told Huie that he was instead “a reddish-haired French Canadian.” Ray, typically, later denied saying Raoul was blond. At other times, he has described Raoul’s hair as being “darkish red, real dark,” “sandy-colored,” or “auburn.” As for Raoul’s complexion, Ray has described it as everything from “ruddy, dark” to being lighter than his own pale coloration.

* In the 20,000 Words, Ray wrote that after the whorehouse robbery he had gone to Gray Rocks, and that he met Raoul after that trip. That, of course, would make more sense as to why he might have gone to Gray Rocks to try and meet a woman—if he had not yet met Raoul there would have been no offer for travel papers. However, the registration papers at Gray Rocks show that Ray did not check in until July 30, eleven days after the supposed robbery. In fact, he had spent that time hanging out around the waterfront. Before the House Select Committee in 1977, Ray admitted that his original version in the 20,000 Words was wrong and instead claimed to have met Raoul before he went to the mountain resort.

^† Huie was the first person to find Keating. In his book, he does not name her, nor did most other writers of early books on the case. Later writers seemed unable to find out who she was, but her name is buried in Ray’s 20,000 Words. The House Select Committee also published her name. When Huie went to Canada to interview her, because of Ray’s awful reputation with women he had expected to find “a shapeless frump” but instead was “flabbergasted … [she was] most attractive. Not in the manner of a brainless sexpot, but in the manner of a cultivated, sensitive, efficient, tastefully dressed and coiffured mature woman. At almost any resort she could have her pick of the unattached men.”

* Claire Keating refused to be interviewed in 1977 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, so the committee was able only to review the Royal Canadian Mounted Police interview with her done shortly after the murder. During her interview with the RCMP, Keating said Ray never mentioned any hatred of blacks and never mentioned Martin Luther King in her presence. However, Keating obviously did not want to be involved, and gave little information. Huie, on the other hand, had lunch with her, spoke to her extensively, and seemingly gained her confidence. As was Huie’s custom with most sources he interviewed, he gave her $100 for the information. She provided Huie more details than she gave the RCMP (MURKIN 5451–5505, section 75, p. 205).

* One of the least plausible aspects of Ray’s story is that if there was a real Raoul, it is extremely unlikely that a professional smuggler like Raoul would have trusted Ray, someone he had met only eight to ten times in a bar in Montreal, with a stash of narcotics. Since Ray would be left on his own with the dope, there was no guarantee that he would not just take off with the valuable load, leaving Raoul cooling his heels on the American side.

* The FBI was unable able to find evidence that Ray had in fact paid any customs duty when reentering the United States (MURKIN 5351–5396, section 73, p. 85).

^† That supposed telephone number has been the source of considerable controversy, with Ray claiming he had written it backward and in code on two pieces of paper, one of which the police stole after his arrest. As for the other copy, James said he gave it to his brother Jerry, but “somebody knocked him in the head in St. Louis in 1971 and he lost the original.” With only the first three digits recalled by Ray, conspiracy buffs have tried every combination of numbers looking in vain for a contact to the mysterious Raoul.

Although Ray claims Raoul was the person that set him up for the King assassination less than eight months later, the very description of Raoul using Ray for smuggling at the U.S.-Canadian border casts further doubt on the tale. Many researchers believe that Raoul was plotting the King murder from the time he met Ray, and was slowly bringing James into the plot. But David Lifton, the author of Best Evidence, a book setting forth an extensive conspiracy in the JFK assassination, spent several months researching the King case for an article he cowrote about Raoul in 1977. He says, “There is one major inconsistency [in Ray’s Raoul story] which crops up again and again. Ray claims to be involved on three occasions in smuggling in both Canada, and at the Mexican border. This does not make sense. A plot to kill Dr. King would not involve the patsy in risky activities, anymore than a plot to kill Kennedy would tell Oswald to go out and take skydiving lessons. The entire plot could fall apart.” Why go to all the trouble of setting up a false identity for the patsy, and make him available to be framed for the assassination, and then risk it all by involving him in smuggling for which he might be arrested and jailed?

* Jerry, expectedly, later denied making these statements to McMillan, then said he could not recall making them. However, the author has reviewed McMillan’s contemporaneous notes for the interviews in question, and there is little reason to doubt that they reflect what Jerry told him.

As for James wanting to help the Wallace campaign, as an avid newspaper reader he would have followed the Alabama governor’s political moves. While Wallace did not officially announce his presidential candidacy for another five months, during the summer of 1967 his movement was noisily under way. Wallace was actively campaigning in multistate appearances, exhorting his followers to “Stand Up for America,” and putting his effort behind the creation of the American Independent Party, a third political party formed only in June.