25

Memphis Bound

Unlike his rushed trip to New Orleans over the Christmas holidays, Ray’s drive east from Los Angeles was a leisurely one. Using his Galt alias, he stayed at cheap motels along the way.1 On the night of March 20, he reached New Orleans.² He dropped off a box of clothes with Marie Martin’s family the following day.³ While there, the local newspapers and radio reported that Dr. King would be in Selma, Alabama, on March 22, recruiting for his Poor People’s Campaign.* Selma had been made famous by King’s groundbreaking work there, and would have been one of the most dramatic places to assassinate him. Ray drove there on March 22 and spent the night at the Flamingo Motel. His appearance in Selma raises the suspicion that Ray was finally stalking his target.^†

The next day, when King left the area, Ray also left. He drove to Atlanta, King’s hometown, passing through Birmingham on the way.* On Saturday, March 23, Ray, using his Galt alias, rented a $10.50-a-week room in a decaying rooming house in the heart of Atlanta’s small hippie community. The faded green, two-story house at 113 Fourteenth Street catered to transients, handling up to 500 boarders a year. A small yard overgrown with weeds marked the front, and a gravel lot in the rear served as a parking lot. Ray’s eight-by-ten-foot room had a worn black and gray tile floor, a single bed, a dresser, and a washbasin. His window faced another similar rooming house next door.

James Garner, the rooming house manager, was drunk much of the time Ray was there.^†4 Still, he remembered Ray—who claimed he was a “jack of all trades”—as being neatly dressed in a dark suit, nice, and well mannered.⁵ He saw Ray—always alone—a few times over ten days. After the assassination, when the FBI searched Ray’s room, they found, among many other items, a map of Atlanta, with four penciled circles on it. One circle was near King’s former home, one near the SCLC headquarters and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King’s father was the pastor, and one at the Capitol Homes housing project, where the Mustang was found abandoned after the assassination. Ray’s thumbprint was on the map.⁶ Over a dozen other maps were found in Ray’s possession, but none bore pencil marks such as those on the Atlanta one.^‡

While Ray had moved to Atlanta, King had not returned there from Selma. Instead, he traveled to New York, where he stayed through March 27, and then went on to Memphis on the twenty-eighth for the sanitation strike.

Ray was not certain how long he might remain in Atlanta. He paid the $10.50 weekly rent on March 24, and again on March 31. On an envelope found in his room after the assassination, he had made notes indicating he also intended to pay the rent for the week starting April 7—which, of course, turned out to be after the assassination, indicating that by late March, Ray had not yet selected a time or place to try to kill King. There is also evidence that if Ray had been hired to kill King, he had not yet received any money, since, short of cash, he exchanged up to $700 of the Canadian money he still had.*⁷

Ray said everything he did in Atlanta revolved around Raoul. His evolving versions of events there provide a good example of how he has adapted his Raoul story over time. For instance, in his original account of his stay in Atlanta—the one he told to Arthur Hanes, Sr.—Ray did not mention having any meal at a restaurant with Raoul.⁸ Then, in September 1968, Hanes found a restaurant receipt—from an Atlanta restaurant on Peachtree Street called Mammy’s Shanty about five blocks from Ray’s rooming house—in Ray’s belongings collected by the FBI. The undated receipt showed that food (London broil for $1.85) was served to two people. Hanes asked questions concerning the receipt and Ray said he knew nothing about it.⁹ When Ray was asked if he had ever ordered London broil, he did not even know what it was.¹⁰ However, Ray is excellent at incorporating bits of information he learns from one source and developing them into a cohesive story he spins to somebody else. After learning of the receipt, he wrote to Huie that on the night he had arrived in Atlanta, he and Raoul “went to a restaurant on Peachtree Street as I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.”¹¹ After Ray fired Hanes, he suddenly told Foreman that he had gone to a “restaurant on Peachtree street” with Raoul. Huie subsequently visited the restaurant and could not find anyone who remembered Ray.

Ray also contended that he wanted Raoul to have easy access to his Atlanta room, so he had an extra key made for him.¹² Before the Select Committee, he at first did not mention the key, saying only that Raoul had trouble getting in and out of the rooming house without the manager, James Garner, noticing him.13 Another time he told the committee that he left the door unlocked for Raoul but Garner’s sister kept relocking it.¹⁴ In yet another committee interview, he reverted to the key story and even claimed that he personally tried to make a copy from a blank key and some tools but gave up after a couple of days because it was too difficult.¹⁵ Still, no one at the rooming house ever saw Ray with anyone.

Thus, Ray’s stories of his association with Raoul are not independently corroborated. There were, however, plenty of witnesses to what Ray did by himself during that time. On March 27, he drove 122 miles to Birmingham, Alabama, to visit the Gun Rack.¹⁶ That was the store where the clerks remembered him from at least one earlier visit and his constant barrage of questions.¹⁷

The following day, back in Atlanta, he purchased a postal money order for $7.50 and sent it to his locksmithing school in New Jersey, notifying the school that he had relocated to Atlanta.¹⁸ This indicates that Ray expected to be in Atlanta for at least a few more weeks (his change-of-address card submitted in Los Angeles showed that he expected to be in Atlanta until April 25).¹⁹

On Friday, March 29, Ray walked into the Long-Lewis hardware store in Bessemer, Alabama, about ten miles outside Birmingham, where he again asked asked about high-powered rifles and ballistics.*²⁰ A little later, at Aeromarine Supply Company, across the road from Birmingham’s municipal airport, Ray—using the name Harvey Lowmeyer—finally paid cash for a .243-caliber rifle with a 2 x 7 Redfield scope and twenty rounds of ammunition.^†21 He paid the $248.59 bill in cash.²² (The next day, Ray also bought some additional ammunition, a cheaper box of older Army ammo, from an unidentified store.)²³

That same day, Ray called Aeromarine and said that he needed to exchange the .243 for a more powerful .30-06 because his brother had told him he had bought the wrong gun.*²⁴ The clerk told him he would have to come back the next morning, so Ray spent the night at a local Travelodge Motel. On March 30, Ray returned the .243 rifle to Aeromarine when it opened at 9:00 A.M. Around 3:00 P.M. he picked up the Remington Gamemaster Model 760 .30-06-caliber rifle—the one that would be left, five days later, in front of the Memphis rooming house from which an assassin killed King.

Raoul is central to Ray’s explanation as to how and why he bought the rifle. In Ray’s version, Raoul gave him $700 to buy a “large-bore deer rifle fitted with scope, plus ammo,” as a sample to be shown to Mexican buyers in a gunrunning scheme.²⁵ If the Mexicans liked the rifle, they would buy another ten. Ray has never explained why foreign gun smugglers would have to buy guns from Raoul and Ray when they could buy them over the counter in most American gun stores—in cash and with no identification—just as Ray had bought the rifle at Aeromarine.^† Nor does he have an explanation of why he spent hours at three shops asking technical ballistics questions if Raoul had only instructed him to buy a rifle for resale.

As before, Ray has constantly changed the details. Sometimes he has said that Raoul accompanied him on the first trip to Aeromarine Supply and simply sat in the car; other times Raoul went with him to Aeromarine only on the second day; and on still other occasions Ray says Raoul was not with him on either visit.²⁶

When he returned to the Travelodge with the first gun, the .243 caliber, Ray says, Raoul looked at it and without any explanation declared “it was the wrong kind.”²⁷ In an interview with the Select Committee, Ray said Raoul stayed in Birmingham overnight so he could approve the selection of the .30-06 before leaving. But in another version, Raoul left Birmingham that same evening, before Ray returned the next day to get the .30-06.²⁸

In most renditions, including his Select Committee testimony, Ray contended Raoul directed him to take the weapon to Memphis a few days later. However, in 1977 he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that he gave the rifle to Raoul in Birmingham and never saw it again.29 In almost every account, Ray said Raoul handled the rifle after Ray touched it for the last time. Yet he cannot explain why only his prints were on it. If the gun had been wiped clean of prints, Ray’s would have been removed with anyone else’s. He once suggested Raoul may have worn Band-Aids or wax over his fingertips to prevent prints being left behind, but admitted he never noticed Raoul wearing either.*³⁰

There is strong evidence that after Ray picked up the .30-06 from Aeromarine Supply, he returned to Atlanta by the early evening of March 30. Garner remembered collecting the second week’s rent the next day. On April 1, Ray dropped some of his clothes at Atlanta’s Piedmont Laundry. That is where Estelle Peters, the manager, signed him in on her ledger as Eric Galt.³¹

Yet Ray told Huie that after he got the .30-06 rifle in Birmingham on March 30, he did not return to Atlanta but instead began a leisurely drive toward Memphis.³² Ray asserted he had dropped off the laundry in Atlanta and paid his second week of rent before he left for Birmingham and the gun stores.³³ Although Memphis was only 312 miles away from Birmingham—some five hours drive—in Ray’s version to Huie it took him five days to get there. The reason the early departure for Memphis is a critical issue is that Ray is claiming he left for the city two days before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference publicly announced that Dr. King would return there for another march. The SCLC made that decision only on March 30. So if Ray was directed to Memphis as early as March 30, it would be potent evidence of a sophisticated conspiracy.³⁴ However, if Ray did not leave Atlanta until April 1, or later, after reading about it in the newspapers, that would be strong proof that he was indeed stalking King.

Problems with Ray’s story of an early departure directly for Memphis were evident to Hanes and Huie as early as mid-1968. Ray had told Hanes that on the journey to Memphis he met Raoul at an unidentified motel in Mississippi on the night of April 2. There, he not only gave Raoul the Remington rifle, but Raoul also told him to rent a room at the South Main Street rooming house in Memphis around 3:00 P.M. on April 4 under the alias John Willard.³⁵ When Hanes heard that story, and then told Huie, both realized that the unidentified Mississippi motel was critical to Ray’s defense. “A witness might be found,” wrote Huie, “who could identify Raoul or who saw a man leaving Ray’s room with a box large enough to hold a rifle.”36 As a result, Hanes, Huie, and a private detective searched extensively for the motel. Ray, who had provided Hanes and Huie remarkably accurate diagrams and maps for locations and motels he visited in Canada, Mexico, and other parts of the United States, could not draw anything reliable about the motel at which he supposedly met Raoul, but he claimed that it was no more than five miles south of the Tennessee-Mississippi state line.

“We went to every motel in Mississippi within twenty miles of Memphis,” recalled Huie, “and we could find no evidence that Ray under any of his aliases, or anyone driving a white Mustang with an Alabama license, had registered at any of them between March 30 and April 3. Similarly, with the motels near Corinth and Florence.”³⁷ When Huie and Hanes learned that James Garner, the manager at the Atlanta rooming house, recalled Ray was actually in Atlanta through the night of April 2, they confronted Ray. In a letter to Huie, Ray suddenly changed the night that he transferred the gun to Raoul to the following evening, April 3, at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis. That was a place where the FBI had confirmed that Ray had spent the night as Eric Galt.³⁸ But still, his changing story about the April 2 meeting, and the fact that he could name none of the motels he supposedly stayed at during his five-day trip to Memphis, left Hanes and Huie uneasy about his entire story.

Before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Ray continued to insist that he had left for Memphis directly from Birmingham, even that he set out a day earlier than he told Hanes and Huie. “After this conversation [with Raoul] I stated a slow trip toward Memphis on the 29th.”³⁹ That was before the SCLC had even decided that King would return for another march, so no one could have had the knowledge to direct Ray there. It was also the day before Ray picked up the .30-06 rifle from Aeromarine Supply in Birmingham, so it was physically impossible for him to have left that early.

That did not stop Ray from embellishing even this story. He told the committee that he spent one night in Decatur, Alabama, one in Florence, Alabama, another in Clinton, Mississippi, and two nights outside Memphis near Corinth, Mississippi, at the DeSoto Motel.*⁴⁰ The committee’s chairman, Ohio congressman Louis Stokes, questioned Ray to ensure there was no misunderstanding about his story and the importance of it.

“Now, you said in your statement to us here that after purchasing the rifle you didn’t return to Atlanta, isn’t that true?”

“That is correct, yes,” said Ray.

“Do you want to change anything at all about that statement?”

“No,” Ray replied with unusual vigor and confidence. “I don’t want to change that one regardless of how many documents you have up there. I know I didn’t return to Atlanta. If I did, I will just take the responsibility for the King case here on TV” (emphasis added).41

What followed in the televised assassination hearings seemed as though it had been scripted for a Perry Mason climax. Stokes presented Ray with copies of receipts from Atlanta’s Piedmont Laundry showing Eric Galt dropped off clothing on Monday, April 1, a day Ray claimed he was in Corinth, Mississippi.⁴² There were two receipts, neatly handwritten by the laundry’s manager, Estelle Peters, one showing the clothes Galt left for dry cleaning, and the other listing clothes for washing. Clearly on the top of each receipt was the name Eric Galt.

Ray and his lawyer, conspiracy buff Mark Lane, were visibly stunned. Lane tried to divert the discussion to the issue of whether the rooming house manager, James Garner, had really spotted Ray in Atlanta during those days. But Stokes would have none of it, directing Ray back to the receipts, and also providing him with a statement from Estelle Peters confirming the accuracy and authenticity of the receipts.⁴³ Ray asked for time to read the document since “this is an important area.”⁴⁴ Picking up the cue from his client, Lane requested a recess. Two hours later, they reappeared. Lane began with a vitriolic attack, calling Peters’s statement a “doctored document” and charging that the entire congressional inquiry was “McCarthy-like,” “indecent” and “very unfair.”⁴⁵ Some of those on the committee familiar with Lane’s pugnacious tactics smiled. His histrionics meant the committee had hit home on a key issue. But Stokes, a prosecutor before he was elected to Congress, ignored Lane and instead started questioning a visibly nervous Ray. “I can’t recall,” protested Ray, “unless this lady made an error on this, or this is some kind of forged document because I know I did not take the laundry in April 1.”⁴⁶

Once Ray mentioned the possibility of a “forged document” Stokes produced another exhibit, a chronological, handwritten “counterbook,” a ledger listing each order dropped off at the Piedmont, including the date it was left and the date it was picked up. The laundry’s practice was to have the clerk write the order information into the counterbook within a few minutes of the customer’s drop-off,⁴⁷ Gait’s two orders were listed on lines 30 and 31 of one of two pages for laundry brought in on April 1, 1968, and the book also showed the laundry was retrieved the day after the assassination, April 5.48

The committee exhibit presented to Ray was 198 pages long, covering nearly 10,000 laundry orders. There were no blank or missing lines on the pages, and Ray’s entry was almost squarely in the middle of one. Because of the way it was created, with various handwritten entries for each of thousands of laundry jobs at Piedmont, it was virtually tamper-proof. It showed that Ray’s protestation of forgery was meritless. But, of course, that did not stop Ray and Lane from offering it as the only possible defense. Just hours earlier Ray had painted himself into a corner by challenging Congressman Stokes, saying that if the committee could prove he returned to. Atlanta after buying the rifle in Birmingham, he would “just take the responsibility for the King case here on TV.”

Lane asserted, “If this in fact is a forged or deceptive document, we have the right to know it. It should not be shown to him to trick this witness.… It looks as if there has been something added or subtracted to this document, from this document. Something may have been superimposed upon it.” Although Ray finally admitted, “I picked up the laundry on April 5,” he would not budge about not putting it there on April 1.⁴⁹

“That was the end of it for almost everyone on the committee,” one investigator told the author. “It was such a clear lie about a major part of his story. Ray was simply caught red-handed, yet he continued dissembling without taking a second breath. It showed us what we were dealing with, a pathological liar who did not change his story even when documents proved him wrong. It was the final proof that we certainly weren’t going to get the truth about anything from Ray.”

* Although King had been scheduled to stop in Selma, he changed his plans at the last moment and instead stopped in Camden, Alabama, about thirty miles away.

^† In the November 11, 1968, edition of Look, Huie wrote that Ray had been stalking King in Selma. Ray had read the galleys before publication, as had his brother Jerry, and both had discussed and approved them. Later, Ray denied stalking King, claiming he did not know King was scheduled to be in Selma, and was only in Selma himself because he got lost while driving to Birmingham. It is not easy to get lost traveling on the straight route from New Orleans to Birmingham, especially ending up in Selma, which requires a turn off the main freeway and then another sixty miles to the city. Moreover, Ray was an experienced driver who had driven without problems through Canada, the United States, and Mexico. He regularly used maps, over a dozen of which were found in his belongings after the assassination. It would be an unlikely coincidence that the only time Ray got lost while driving around the country was on a day that put him in a city where Dr. King was scheduled to be. It seems more plausible that Ray was indeed stalking King and getting a feel for the security around him.

* He arrived in Birmingham around noon, and claims he met Raoul at the Starlite Café and then drove with him to Atlanta. No one at the cafe later remembered Ray or a person who fit Raoul’s description.

^† Ray says that when he rented the room on the twenty-third, the manager was drunk. When Ray returned the following day he convinced Garner he had already paid the rent, when in fact he had not. Ray also claimed that Raoul accompanied him to the rooming house on the twenty-third, but Garner does not remember seeing anybody with Ray.

^‡ Ray supporters often ignore or distort the evidence about the Atlanta map. Harold Weisberg, for instance, flatly but incorrectly writes, “No Ray print on the marked map of Atlanta!” (emphasis in original). The author obtained an order of the court in Memphis to examine personally the physical evidence in the case, and part of that review in volved inspecting Ray’s maps. Ray has claimed that he often marked maps to get his bearings. Although all the maps reviewed by the author are in poor condition due to the FBI’s application of a solvent for finding fingerprints, the pencil markings on the Atlanta map are still visible, and no other map has similar ones. Ray himself realized that the markings were highly incriminating. “I could never explain that away to the jury,” he admitted to the Select Committee. Instead, he said the markings related to restaurants and banks he visited. “I gave it a lot of thought,” Ray said, “and that’s the best I could come up with” (HSCA vol. IX, p. 224).

* The fact that Ray was worried about running low on cash and had to use his Canadian funds indicates that if he had been hired to kill King, he had not been paid anything by late March, only a week before the murder.

* Questions by Ray such as how much bullets might drop at anywhere from 100 to 600 yards, indicates that he was evidently not considering an assassination at close range, which would immediately lead to his capture. Instead, his interest was in a long-range shot, sufficiently removed from the actual kill so that he would have a fair opportunity to get away. The only other assassin in Ray’s memory who had at least managed to escape from the crime scene was Lee Oswald, who also had shot from a long distance with a high-powered rifle.

^† Ray told William Bradford Huie that he did not buy the gun in the Atlanta area because his only valid identification was the Alabama license for Eric S. Galt. So he made the two-hour trip to Birmingham, a city with which he was familiar from his 1967 stay there. His intent was to buy the gun under a new alias, making it more difficult to trace him. If the Alabama stores required a proper ED, he had decided he would reluctantly resort to his Galt driver’s license. As for the name Ray did use, a Harvey Edward Lohmeyer had worked in a prison kitchen with John Ray, James’s brother, in Illinois during the late 1950s. On the receipt, the name is printed as “Lowmeyer” but it appears the scribbled signature is “Lowmyer.” Some authors, such as Gerold Frank in An American Death, use Lowmyer as the name.

* Jerry Ray boasted to author George McMillan (in a February 23, 1975, interview maintained with the McMillan papers at the Southern Historical Collection) that he was in Birmingham with James on the day the rifle was purchased. However, he asked McMillan to understand why he could not answer more questions about where and when they test-fired the rifle. According to McMillan’s notes, “Jerry let it slip to me, ‘the rifle had to be one that would do it in one shot.’” Jerry has since denied telling McMillan that, and now claims he was at work consistently through this period, with only Tues days off. The rifle transactions at Aeromarine Supply took place on Friday and Saturday. Some coworkers supported Jerry Ray’s claim, although his work records no longer exist so the issue cannot be definitively settled.

^† As a result of King’s murder, a federal law was passed that required gun sellers to obtain the purchaser’s name, age, address, place of birth, and home telephone number, and to produce a valid identification such as a driver’s license.

* Ray never fails to contradict himself if asked the same question enough times. He once told the Select Committee that he never saw Raoul handle the rifle (HSCA vol. II, p.15).

* Ray actually picked up the name DeSoto from one of the guards assigned to Cell Block A during 1968 and 1969. The guard, listening to Ray’s story, suggested that he might have stayed at the DeSoto Motel. Harold Weisberg, who served as an investigator for Ray in the 1970s, says that in 1974 he confirmed that Ray had stayed at the DeSoto on April 2. Weisberg’s “confirmation” was talking to the manager and maids who suddenly, six years after the event, claimed to remember Ray staying there one night on April 2. Of course, they could provide no records to substantiate the visit, claiming the FBI took their records shortly after the assassination, something there is no indication of in FBI files.