21

Wallace Country

Alabama was the scene of many of Martin Luther King’s greatest triumphs in the civil rights movement. It was also the home of some of his most venomous enemies. Because Ray chose Birmingham as the place to settle when he came back to the States, it is tempting to speculate that the decision to kill King had already been made, either by Ray or by someone who placed him there. Yet after moving there, almost nothing that he did during the next six weeks seemingly had any political nexus, much less made him look like a man obsessed with murdering King.

Ray arrived in Birmingham on Friday, August 25, and checked into the Granada Hotel, four blocks from the train station.1 He used his old alias John L. Rayns in case the clerk asked for identification. “In the morning I picked up a newspaper in the lobby and started looking for rooms to let,” recalled Ray.² He found one in familiar surroundings, a cheap rooming house in a poor south-side neighborhood. Known as the Economy Grill and Rooms, it was a two-story stucco building with space for eighteen roomers.* The Spanish-style archway that marked the entrance through a small garden had a large sign proclaiming ECONOMY SLEEPING ROOMS. A poster announcing WE SERVE MAXWELL HOUSE COFFEE dominated the lobby desk. The residence’s only public phone was in the long hallway. Ray registered with the manager, Peter Cherpes, whom he described as an “easy going middle-aged fellow of Greek extraction who didn’t ask a lot of questions.” (Cherpes was actually seventy-two years old.)3 Ray signed in as Eric S. Galt and told Cherpes he was an ex-employee of Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and that he was in Birmingham for a long holiday that might extend up to four months.⁴ When Cherpes jovially remarked that it was a “long vacation,” Ray was serious, saying merely that he had been working hard and needed the break.

Cherpes assigned Ray to Room 14 and collected $22.50 cash in advance for a week’s rent, which included breakfast and dinner.⁵ “One reason I picked his place,” Ray noted, “was that when he showed me the room, I noticed a side window opening onto a passage leading to the back of the building—a handy escape route if the occasion demanded.”⁶

Ray was a model tenant. Cherpes later remembered him as a “good-looking” and “quiet fellow,” who “dressed well, usually a suit with a tie … especially a plaid sports suit.”⁷ “You couldn’t imagine a nicer guy to have around,” said Cherpes about the roomer who paid his rent promptly every week and mostly talked about the weather.⁸ Ray spent much of his time in the lounge watching television. He also ate most of his meals there, and Cherpes recalled, “He usually turned in early, didn’t go out much. He never had telephone calls or visitors.”*⁹

Ray did not mingle with the other roomers. Even at breakfast, when all the tenants gathered in the dining area, he arrived late, ate on his own, and then returned to his room, where he often spent much of the day.¹⁰ This low-key approach paid off for a man who did not want to be distinctly recalled. While Cherpes may have had good memories of Ray, the other roomers did not recognize photographs of him, much less remember anything about him.¹¹ Even Cherpes, when first shown two pictures of Ray, studied them carefully for several minutes, and the best he could say was that the photos “bear a very close resemblance to him, however, I can’t be sure.”12 Ray’s generic features and quiet demeanor were two of his greatest assets as a fugitive—he could pass as everyman, often leaving no clear impression on those who encountered him.

On August 28, two days after checking into the rooming house, Ray paid a seven-dollar annual fee to rent a safe deposit box at the Birmingham Trust National Bank as Eric S. Galt.¹³ As a required reference, he gave a fictitious Karl Galt of 2515 Lafayette Street, St. Louis (his late brother Franklin had lived on Lafayette, but there was no number 2515).*

The next day Ray answered an advertisement he had seen in the classified section of The Birmingham News for a 1966 Mustang. The asking price was $1,995. Ray called the owner, William Paisley, a sales manager for a local lumber company, and arranged to meet him that evening.¹⁴ Shortly after 7:00 P.M., he arrived at Paisley’s house by taxi and inspected the car. Paisley offered to let him take it for a test spin, but Ray declined, saying he did not have a driver’s license.¹⁵ Ray liked the red leather interior but not the exterior color—a pale yellow that appeared to be white. “If you are going to do something illegal,” Ray later said, “I’d rather not have a white car to do it in.”¹⁶

But without much hesitation, he told Paisley, “I’ll take it off your hands.”¹⁷ “He didn’t try to cut the price at all,” recalled a surprised Paisley, who was ready to drop his price by up to $300. But Ray said that he had been saving his money, and since he worked on a river barge, he had no place to spend it.¹⁸ The fact that Ray, normally a penny-pincher, did not even try to negotiate a better deal is a good indication that he was flush with money. The most expensive car he had ever previously owned was worth $250.^†

They talked a little after agreeing on the deal. Ray, an inveterate liar, spun a new story for Paisley. He said he worked on a barge line that ran between New Orleans, St. Louis, and Memphis but did not like the twenty-day stretches without a break.19 Instead, he was now hoping to land a job with the Social Security Administration.²⁰ As for his private life, Ray said he was divorced from his wife, who lived in Rocky Ridge, an area south of Homewood, Alabama.²¹ When Paisley said he was sorry to hear that Galt was divorced, Ray breezily said, “Yeah, that’s the way it goes.”²²

Before leaving, Paisley and Ray agreed to exchange the money and car registration the next morning near Ray’s bank. When they met around 10:15 A.M., Ray was neatly dressed in a sports jacket and open-necked shirt. He took a thick roll of cash from his shirt pocket.²³ Paisley was nervous as Ray calmly counted out $2,000, mostly in twenties, with some hundreds—“Man, let’s be careful with this kind of money,” warned Paisley.²⁴ When Ray finished, Paisley crossed the street to his own bank, the First National, got five dollars change for Ray, and then took him to an adjoining parking lot, where he gave him keys to the car.²⁵

Cherpes, the rooming house manager, was pleased to help Ray transfer the car title and get his driver’s license.²⁶ On September 6, Ray and Cherpes filed the driver’s license application at the Jefferson County Courthouse in downtown Birmingham. This was the first time Ray was asked for the full middle name of his alias, and he provided “Starvo”. On the application, he made himself a little younger (three years) and a little taller (two inches).²⁷ He listed the rooming house as his local address, said he was an unemployed merchant mariner, and that his last license had expired in 1962 in Louisiana. That was a good place to give as a reference, since at the time Louisiana was one of the few states that did not maintain previous records for driver’s licenses. When Ray took his physical driving test, he passed with an 86 percent score and a notation that he “needs training as to posture and attention.” The report listed his eyesight as a perfect 20/20.

Later in the month, Ray ordered camera equipment—a Kodak super-8 camera, model M8; a Kodak Dual projector, model M95Z; one HPI combination splicing machine, and a twenty-foot remote-control cable—for $337.24 from the Superior Bulk Film Company in Chicago.²⁸ On the back of the order coupon Ray requested that the equipment be sent special delivery to him—“I would like this order as soon as possible”—and that he also wanted any manuals about “sound stripers, descriptive circular on LSF automatic cine printer, and the price of the Eumig Mark S Sound Projector.”* He also sent a money order for $8.95 to the Modern Photo Bookstore in New York requesting the Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, described on the book jacket as “a one-volume photographic library.” On the rear of the order coupon, which Ray had clipped from Modern Photography magazine, the FBI later discovered his left thumbprint.²⁹

Ray has an explanation for almost everything he did in Birmingham, and, as might be expected, it revolves around Raoul, who Ray says directed his actions. Two days after he moved into the rooming house, Ray checked with the general delivery branch of the post office, and a letter from Raoul had arrived that very day. It directed him to meet Raoul that evening at a diner—the Starlite Café—across the street from the post office.^† There they met. “We’ll need a good set of wheels,” Raoul supposedly told Ray. “But I don’t want to spend more than a couple of thousand. Can you take care of that?”³⁰ The next day they again met at the Starlite, and Raoul gave Ray $2,000. After he bought the Mustang, Ray picked up Raoul from the Starlite and drove him to the rooming house. Even though they were at the Starlite on three occasions and at the rooming house most of that night, no one remembered anyone with Ray, nor did they recall anyone who could have been Raoul.

Raoul is then supposed to have told Ray that “there are some things I want you to buy.”³¹ He gave him $500 and the list of camera equipment to order, which Ray assumed Raoul just wanted to sell in Mexico, where it might fetch a higher price.³² When Ray asked for some more money for living expenses, Raoul forked over another $500 without any questions.^‡33 He also supposedly gave Ray a new contact telephone number, this time in Baton Rouge.§ Finally, Raoul asked for a set of keys to the Mustang. “I gave him a set of keys at his request,” wrote Ray, “I think I got about 3 sets from the original owner.”34 (Paisley was adamant that he gave Ray only two sets of keys, and since Ray admitted to having two when he left Birmingham, there was no extra set for Raoul.³⁵)

Before leaving the rooming house, Raoul told Ray that “we would be taking something into Mexico in a couple of months and he would write me where to meet him.”³⁶

Again, Ray’s version makes little sense from the perspective of a Raoul-type character. In a matter of days he had given Ray almost $4,000 and allowed him to buy and register a car under his new alias. He had no guarantee that Ray, a fugitive convict, would not abscond with the cash and car. A real Raoul could simply have used Galt’s name to buy the car and camera equipment himself, thereby never risking the money. Meeting Ray in public places such as the café was an unnecessary risk that no seasoned criminal would take if he wanted to ensure that no one could later tie him to Ray. And, of course, Raoul was supposed to have stayed in Birmingham for a couple of nights while he met with Ray. But where? The FBI’s postassassination investigation failed to find any hotel, motel, or flophouse with the right name or description.

However, from Ray’s perspective, his movements and actions in Birmingham make perfect sense. Having given his battered car to Jerry, he needed a new one. Buying it from a private party was a smart idea, since Ray had cash and no driver’s license, something that might have raised questions or suspicion from a car dealer. Nervous that the FBI might be close to tracing his John Rayns identification and social security number, it appears Ray came to Birmingham in order simply to establish solid identification for Galt, and in this he succeeded. Although he still did not have a passport, birth certificate, or social security card, he now had a driver’s license, car registration and title, and safe-deposit-box agreement, all showing him to be a resident of Alabama with a permanent address at 2608 Highland Avenue, the site of the rooming house.

Besides obtaining a car and getting documentation for his Galt ID, what about the camera equipment? Ray told Huie that he “didn’t know what the stuff was,” but that “after buying [it] and reading about films and cameras I got interested in pictures.”37 However, his detailed note to the mail order company exposes this as a lie and shows that Ray was already well informed when he ordered it.³⁸ Some researchers have speculated that he merely wanted to take numerous pictures of himself so that he could better decide how to disguise himself as a fugitive. Again, Ray told Huie that when he was in Birmingham, he expected that at any moment the FBI might put him on its ten most-wanted list.³⁹ But Ray did not just order a basic camera to take photos of himself; he asked instead for equipment that allowed him to film amateur movies, including the use of slow motion and settings for different lighting conditions. If he had merely wanted to take his own picture with a remote cable, he could have had the entire setup for less than $50, not the nearly $400 he spent. One filmmaker who reviewed Ray’s order told author George McMillan that Ray had purchased “a completely self-sufficient movie-making unit of good quality.”⁴⁰ Given its sophistication and the money he spent, a more likely explanation is that Ray was buying it for his own freelance venture into the porn business. Just a couple of months before ordering the camera equipment, Jerry said, the brothers had discussed that possibility at the Chicago summit meeting. A few weeks after that, James had ordered sex manuals from a California distributor. When he returned to the States in late August, he again asked Jerry to go into porn with him, but Jerry claimed that he had declined.

Moreover, James had already inquired about a sound unit, and in his order asked for the long remote cable. It meant not only that he contemplated commercial sales, but also that he might have thought about personally being in the films. A few weeks earlier, while in Montreal, Ray had sent a one-dollar money order to E. Z. Formula in Hollywood, California, the maker of a compound that promised to turn regular glass into a two-way mirror, something that would allow him to surreptitiously film women.⁴¹ When asked about his interest in the chemical by the Select Committee, Ray dodged the question. “I really don’t know what I ordered.… If there’s something in there, I don’t know all the technical terms of the stuff.”⁴² The only thing he lacked was the equipment to develop the films, but a host of independent printing companies existed in Los Angeles, a city to which he would soon move. To Ray, his initial order was likely a capital investment in what could prove to be a lucrative new business.

While in Birmingham, Ray continued paying for his weekly locksmithing correspondence lessons, but also added some new ventures: once-a-week dance lessons at the Continental Dance Club Studios, and membership in a lonely hearts club in Canada.43 He says that he took the ten-dollar dance course because “I was thinking I mite half to go to a Latin American country and it helps socialy if you know a little something about the Latin Dances.”⁴⁴ His instructor remembered him unkindly as a clumsy loner.⁴⁵ She tried to integrate him into the group of sixteen other students, but Ray was too timid. When she spoke to him, he would not look at her eyes but instead glance away or drop his head. He answered questions only with a simple yes or no.*⁴⁶

As for the lonely hearts club, when Ray left Canada for Birmingham, he had taken some Canadian newspapers with him. In one of those, he saw an advertisement for “one of the international clubs.… These people who belong to these clubs are not criminals but they are not what the hippies refer to as squares. I still had not ruled out a Canadian passport and I thought I mite contack someone in Canada through one of these clubs.”⁴⁷ He claimed that if he developed a relationship, he would eventually ask someone to sign his passport application.

It is unlikely that Ray really thought he should know Latin dance steps if he intended to make a successful flight as a fugitive to Latin America. Also, it is hard to imagine why he would still be interested in the difficult process of finding a Canadian to vouch that they had known him for two years so that he could get a passport, if supposedly his entire relationship with Raoul was predicated on the eventual payoff of a passport. It is more likely that Ray simply considered both the dance lessons and the lonely hearts club as ways of meeting women. He never got a bite from either.

Ray maintains that “about the 5th or 6th of October Raoul wrote me and ask me to come to Heuvo Larado [Nuevo Laredo] Mex” and that is why he left Birmingham.⁴⁸ At times he has described his upcoming venture as gunrunning and at other times as dope smuggling.⁴⁹ But actually, Ray had decided to leave before his alleged friend ever contacted him. In late September, Ray had telephoned the Chicago film company to tell them he would be leaving Birmingham no later than October 7, the last day through which his rent was paid at the rooming house.⁵⁰ He also wrote to the Modern Photo Bookstore in New York on September 26 and said, “If you have not allready mailed the book (PLEASE DO NOT MAIL IT) I am moving and will shortly send you my correct address.”51 As for his safe deposit box, he made his final visit on September 28, taking three minutes to clear it out.* The notification to the camera company and the bookstore, and the last visit to his deposit box, mean that Ray had decided on his own to leave Birmingham nearly a week before he claimed to receive any direction from Raoul.^†

Now that he was ready to leave, Ray decided it was time to replace the gun he had buried in Canada before he reentered the States. On October 1, he saw another classified ad in The Birmingham News. This was for a Japanese-made Liberty Chief snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver.⁵² Ray called the seller, Walter Spain, drove to his house, and examined the gun that evening. Spain—who was also unable later to positively identify Ray from photographs—said he wanted $65 for it.⁵³ Ray pulled out a stack of bills and peeled off the money. He pocketed the pistol and left.⁵⁴

There was a strategy in the length of Ray’s stay in Birmingham, and he completed it when he finished building the paper trail for Galt. The last identification items for which he was waiting were the license plates for his Mustang, which he had to purchase after October 1, when the old ones expired. On October 2, Ray bought the new tags: Alabama 1–38993.55 While standing in line at the motor vehicles department, George Seibels, Jr., who ran successfully for mayor in the next month’s election, came by politicking. “He shook hands with me and asked me to vote for him,” Ray later boasted to Huie.

Now that he had his license plates, Ray made final preparations for his departure. Having endured Birmingham’s sweltering summer, he was eager to leave. Although Ray later remarked that his time in Birmingham had been “uneventful,” he had often been depressed during his six weeks there, and for a while his melancholy was so pronounced that he visited several local doctors.⁵⁶ His once again obsessive fretting about his health created some of the problem. He was sick for nearly two months, he later complained.⁵⁷ He had trouble sleeping. To one of the doctors he complained he had the “flu or something with a sore throat”—later he thought it was pneumonia.⁵⁸ For that, he received “some shots plus some pills [the antibiotics penicillin and tetracycline, and some sleeping pills].” Then later, “I was still feeling bad,” so Ray saw a psychiatrist who prescribed antidepressant pills.*⁵⁹

The shipment of the camera equipment from Superior Bulk Film finally arrived on October 4, but the company had substituted a Crestline super-8 camera for the Kodak.⁶⁰ Ray did not want the replacement, and the next day he wrote back saying that he “was well please with everything except the camera, which I am returning. The camera you sent me has only one film speed and I wanted the Kodak M8 which has 4.” Impatient, Ray went out the same day he wrote that letter (October 5) and bought a Polaroid 220 Land camera. He soon wrote another letter to Superior Bulk Film, asking for a refund instead of a replacement.^†

Also on October 5, he sent a letter to the Continental Dance Club, apologizing that he could not attend the rest of the classes because he was leaving town, but that if he returned, he would resume his lessons.61 Later that day, he told Peter Cherpes he was leaving for work on a boat in Mobile, Alabama.⁶² He drove south, this time in his flashy Mustang, a Confederate sticker on the front bumper, breezily heading back toward Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.⁶³ “I knew it from my last visit to Mexico in 1959,” recalled Ray. “On the outskirts there was an area known as ‘Boystown,’ a wide-open scene with about 35 bars that ran 24 hours except for a ten-minute break when the operators cleared the floor so someone could sweep up. I’d gotten to know Boystown pretty well on my last visit. I wondered if it was still the same wild place.”⁶⁴

* The rooming house was not far from the office of Dr. Edward Fields, one of the leaders in the militant and segregationist National States Rights Party (NSRP). After the assassination, the NSRP counsel, J. B. Stoner, became one of Ray’s lawyers, and Jerry Ray worked for Stoner as a driver and bodyguard. Did Ray have contact with Fields or the NSRP—an organization that might well have wanted King dead—while he was in Birmingham? The FBI and the House Select Committee investigated whether there was any preassassination contact and found none. Dr. Fields, now living in Georgia, and the editor of the last segregationist newspaper in America, The Truth At Last, was adamant in telling the author that he had never heard of James Earl Ray before the assassination. He also, however, could not say whether any individual NSRP member had been in contact with Ray, as the organization had many members and he did not know all of them.

* The FBI not only checked all toll calls made from the pay phone at the rooming house, but also those on all public telephones in the neighborhood. It found no calls made to Ray’s brothers, or to telephone numbers in Louisiana, where Ray claimed he had a contact number for Raoul.

* The bank’s records show that Ray accessed the safe deposit box only four times. When he rented it on August 28, it was not opened. He returned later that day, at 2:32 P.M., and had access to it for five minutes. That means he put something into it on his first use, since it was empty beforehand. He later told Huie that he put his Rayns identification there, because he did not want to run the risk of being stopped by police and found with two different names. On his subsequent visits—September 5 (four minutes), September 21 (four minutes), and September 28 (three minutes)—Ray certainly did not return just to look at his Rayns identification. He must have kept it for storing the bulk of his money while in Birmingham (MURKIN 2323–2324, section 21, p. 107).

^† Conspiracist Harold Weisberg noted that the Mustang had an automatic transmission. He then quoted a newspaper article in which a gas station attendant, after the assassination, mistakenly said he had fixed a clutch problem on the car. Weisberg uses the erroneous secondary source to imply there were two Mustangs, one that Ray bought from Paisley, and a second one with a clutch that he drove. As is typical of the wilder conspiracy charges, the issue is raised to imply some supposedly sinister connotation, yet Weisberg never explains why Ray would have wanted two Mustangs or what purpose it would serve in an assassination plot still over seven months away.

* The sound striper lays a magnetic coating for a sound track. The cine printer reproduces film. The Eumig projector was to record sound on film.

^† The letter was addressed to Eric S. Galt, for which Ray had no identification at that time. He said the postal clerk asked him for his middle initial and, when he said “S,” then gave him the letter. As with Ray’s other descriptions of how he met with Raoul, the letter routine at a general delivery post office requires a lot of luck to work correctly and seems a most unlikely form of communication. For instance, if Ray had not checked with the post office that day, or if the letter was delayed by even a day, Raoul and Ray would miss their evening rendezvous. Somehow, in his versions, Ray usually managed to check with the post office just after the arrival of Raoul’s letters, usually directing Ray to do something later that very day.

^‡ Later, in his book Who Killed Martin Luther King?, Ray changed the amount Raoul supposedly gave him, upping the expense money from $500 to $1,000.

§ Ray later said that when he left Birmingham, he drove through Baton Rouge. Curious about the number Raoul had given him, Ray said he went to a phone booth and checked all the telephone numbers in the Baton Rouge directory until he found it. The number was registered to a Herman A. Thompson. The House Select Committee on Assassinations extensively investigated Thompson. He had been an assistant chief criminal sheriff’s deputy in East Baton Rouge for twenty-six years.

Under oath, Thompson stated he never knew anyone named or nicknamed Raoul. He adamantly denied ever knowing, meeting, or speaking with Ray or anyone using Ray’s known aliases. The committee investigated whether Ray may have maliciously implicated Thompson as a means of settling a grudge or aiding a fellow inmate, but Thompson could not recall ever arresting, incarcerating, or transporting any person who had contact with the prisons where Ray had been an inmate.

Thompson said he was never a member of any white extremist organization and that he never had any complaints or disciplinary actions filed against him. His former employer confirmed his statements.

The committee concluded it “found no evidence to indicate that Herman Thompson was involved in the assassination or with an individual named Raoul.” The committee concluded, further, that “Ray’s allegation was merely an attempt to gain credence for his Raoul story and to raise an implication of official complicity in the assassination.” Even Ray, at one point when pressed by the committee, suddenly said, “I thought that was a fraudulent number.… I concluded it was probably something just to put the heat on someone.”

* The owners of the Birmingham dance studio had previously owned one in New Orleans. They mistakenly told the FBI that they remembered “Galt” had also taken a yearlong course from them in the Big Easy in 1964. Of course, they were surprised to learn that Ray was incarcerated in Jeff City at that time.

* Ray initially told Huie that he sent the safe deposit keys back to the bank from Baton Rouge while he was driving to Mexico. Bank records show the account, while inactive, was closed on December 13, nearly two months later. Some authors, such as Clay Blair, have contended that since Ray was in Los Angeles in mid-December, the timing of the account’s closing raises the possibility of an accomplice. However, their conclusion appears to be based on a mistake by a bank clerk. When Ray returned the keys, he included a letter in which he wrote that he no longer needed the box since he was “moving to Louisiana.” One of the bank clerks had noted when closing Ray’s file that he had moved to Baton Rouge. When asked by the FBI why she listed Baton Rouge, she could not recall, but guessed that it may have been due to the envelope’s postmark. There is no way to know, however, since by the time the FBI investigated, the bank had long ago destroyed the envelope that contained Ray’s letter. It is more likely that the letter actually arrived in mid-October, and the clerk either wrote the wrong date into the bank’s records or forgot to officially close the box until December. Such writers as Blair and Huie subsequently converted the likely clerical error into an incontrovertible fact in their versions.

^† By the time Ray wrote Tennessee Waltz in 1987, he realized that his story’s timing meant he had made his decision to leave Birmingham instead of taking orders from Raoul. As a result, Ray altered the story in his book, saying that Raoul actually wrote him a letter “in late September” about the upcoming trip to Mexico. Before the House Select Committee, Ray said that he had called the contact number in New Orleans several times in late September, and an unidentified man, someone who kept track of Raoul and his whereabouts, coordinated Ray’s departure for Nuevo Laredo. Yet in an interview with Dan Rather in 1977, Ray had said he did not know he was to meet Raoul in Nuevo Laredo when he left Birmingham.

* Ray later wrote several lists for Huie titled “points that could be used against me.” One was “mental history” and another was “received anti-depression pills from Dr. at Birmingham.” The other two dealt with his two-month internment in the psychiatric ward while incarcerated at Jeff City and his use of hypnotists and psychiatrists when he was in Los Angeles after his Birmingham stay.

^† The film company first tried mailing the Kodak camera to Galt in Birmingham, and then later a refund to him in Mexico. Both were returned. Ray did not receive the $140 refund for the camera until a week before King’s assassination. He never cashed it before the murder and afterward had to destroy it because he “couldn’t take the risk of cashing it.” Even when he talked to Huie, months after the assassination, he was still bitter that he had lost that money.

As for his purchase of a Polaroid Land camera, Huie reported that Ray paid $245 for it, and McMillan repeated that, but it is almost certainly wrong. The author checked with Polaroid, and the 220 camera, an instant-developing still camera introduced that year, was the second-cheapest in the 200 series, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $75. Even with accessories and film, it is unlikely that Ray could have spent $245 on the camera. Ray told the Select Committee that the Polaroid cost him $56, and he was probably right.