27

On the Run

Within two minutes of the shooting, Ray had left the scene of the assassination and was on his way toward the Mississippi state line.1

Ray’s story was that he was on his way back to the rooming house from the gas station when he “ran into a police roadblock.”² Since he was a fugitive, Ray immediately turned around and drove away. “When police are around,” he said, “I try to avoid the area.” Before the Select Committee, Congressman Louis Stokes asked Ray why he did not just drive to another part of town. “It was my intention,” he said, “to drive out into Mississippi on the highway and stop at a service station and make a telephone call and attempt to find out if anything had taken place illegally.”³ He was “apprehensive” that something had gone awry with the gun deal at the rooming house.⁴ That was despite the fact that Raoul had supposedly assured him there would be no gun deal until Ray returned to the rooming house later that night.⁵ “I was playing it safe on assumptions of what might have been,” recalled Ray.⁶

He was already in Mississippi, he recalled, when he heard a radio news bulletin that Dr. King had been shot in Memphis.⁷ A little while after the first news flash, Ray heard another report that the police were looking for a white Mustang.⁸ From the time of the first broadcast, Ray said, he was “really” in a hurry and he drove the 350 miles straight to Atlanta without stopping.⁹ Fearful that his car would be spotted, he stayed largely on dark side roads, and the journey took him nearly eleven hours.10 As he drove along, he threw out “everything I could get ahold of,” including “the camera equipment … I didn’t know what else I threw out … anything I could get my hands on I threw out the back seat of the car.… I just wanted to get rid of everything that would connect me with the Mustang. Or that would connect me with anything.”*¹¹

When he reached Atlanta, it was shortly after dawn on April 5. He parked the Mustang in the rear of the Capitol Homes housing project, figuring that “if it’s in a parking lot it might sit there a few days” before the police found it, and he “wiped the fingerprints off the car.”¹² He had already stopped twice, once at a gas station, and wiped down the interior.¹³ “I know I wiped everything off the Mustang after they started looking for me.”^†14

Ray’s hurried departure from Memphis has the earmark of guilt. Ray later said he only “vaguely” knew who Dr. King was, and did not know he was in Memphis—much less that he was staying at a motel only two hundred feet away from the rooming house where Ray had his room. However, the initial bulletins did not say where King was shot, so if Ray had been telling the truth about his ignorance of King and his whereabouts, the news of the shooting would have caused no panic in him. But his reaction was to drive eleven hours to Atlanta, throw hundreds of dollars’ worth of goods from his car window, and wipe his fingerprints off the vehicle. When asked by the Select Committee why he threw out his camera equipment, he admitted, “I don’t have any rational explanation.”¹⁵ Why did he wipe the fingerprints off the car? “Naturally, I would have any fingerprints off of everything if I was going to commit a crime,” he said.

Once he reached Atlanta, “I went back to the rooming house that I had rented.”¹⁶ He had to retrieve the pistol he had left there before making the trip to Memphis.¹⁷ “I had it in my mind,” recalled Ray, “that if I was short of money I may have to do some holdups to get out of the country, whichever country I was in, Canada or something like that.”^‡18 He also quickly had to decide what to take with him. Anything bulky, such as his typewriter, was abandoned. Ray also deliberately left some other items—a Los Angeles Free Press, a John Birch Society pamphlet, and two pairs of pants in sizes too small for him—“you know, to try to throw the police off.”*¹⁹ Despite leaving behind the Atlanta map with his fingerprint and the pencil markings showing that he had stalked King—an obvious mistake—he did his best to make the room useless to investigators when they found it. “I wanted to get the fingerprints off there.… I think I did wipe my prints off various things in the rooming house.… I think I cleaned the place up the best I could and got rid of all the junk.”²⁰

By 9:00 A.M., Ray was at the Piedmont Laundry around the corner from his rooming house.²¹ Estelle Peters, the same manager who was there when he dropped his clothing off on April 1, was on duty. While Peters retrieved the dry cleaning and small bundle of laundry, she noticed that Ray “kinda paced in the front. And he just acted a little bit nervous.”^†22

After picking up his clothes, Ray took a cab to the bus station and put his luggage in a locker. He had worked out a route to Canada, where he had fled twice before as a fugitive. He went to a local bar until it was time to catch his first connection, a bus to Cincinnati.²³ Ray became nervous because the 11:30 A.M. departure was delayed for two hours, but finally the bus left. He reached Cincinnati about 1:30 on the morning of April 6, and had a half-hour layover before getting the next bus to Detroit, where he arrived about 8:00 A.M.²⁴ There he took a taxi for the short ride to Windsor, Canada. Less than forty hours after the murder, he had safely made it to another country.²⁵ With some time to spare before he left for Toronto, Ray visited a local barber and had a shave.²⁶ His train departed in the early afternoon, and Ray was in Toronto by 5:00 P.M. on April 6.²⁷

He rented a room in a second-rate rooming house at 106 Ossington Avenue, an area where many immigrants lived.²⁸ The manager was Polish-born Feliksa Szpakowska, who also lived there with her husband, Adam, and nine-year-old daughter.^‡29 “The woman couldn’t hardly speak any English,” recalled Ray, “and the man not much better.”30 Ray, who had seen a vacancy sign in the front window, took a room with a bay window that overlooked the street.³¹ His $10-a-week room had a console television in the corner, a small painting of Jesus on the wall, and an embroidered doily that read HOME SWEET HOME. He had planned to give Szpakowska a new alias, figuring that it was time to abandon Galt, but she did not ask for his name. She later told the authorities that she never got American names right anyway.³² Szpakowska recalled that her tenant was quiet and ventured out during the days.³³ He kept to himself, ate alone in his room, and put his head down when he would walk past her. Every evening she heard his television, and in the morning when she cleaned his room, she would find a stack of newspapers by his bed.

While he followed the news carefully, he was initially preoccupied with obtaining new identification, particularly a passport. He intended to head for Europe, and then for Rhodesia or South Africa. Seeking a suitable alias, Ray first visited a graveyard to search tombstones for names of men who had birth dates near his, but found that too difficult. The office of a Toronto newspaper proved more helpful. There he viewed microfilm of past issues, searching for birth announcements that might be suitable to appropriate as his own.*³⁴

Ray needed to find someone who not only fit his age, but who also did not have a current passport. He feared that anyone who had a passport picture on file might not look like him, therefore his application would be immediately revealed as fraudulent.³⁵ Moreover, Ray was still under the mistaken impression from his 1967 trip that he needed a guarantor to vouch for his passport. He had devised a plan to develop two false identifications and use one for the actual passport application and the other as the guarantor.^†36

On Wednesday, April 10, Ray sent $2 and a handwritten letter to the Bureau of Vital Statistics requesting a copy of a birth certificate for Paul Edward Bridgman, listing both his father’s name and mother’s maiden name, and the Ossington Avenue address.37 Ray then gave Szpakowska a piece of paper with the name Bridgman on it, telling her it was his, and that if any mail arrived for that name, to please give it to him.³⁸ The next day, April 11, Ray had passport photos taken at the Arcade Photo Studio, giving his name as Paul Bridgman.³⁹ The manager, Mabel Agnew, remembered Ray because he would not smile, but instead just stared glumly into the camera.⁴⁰

The next day, the real Bridgman—a thirty-five-year-old coordinator of language studies for the Toronto Board of Education—received a telephone call from Ray, who identified himself as an official in the Canadian Immigration Department.⁴¹ Ray asked questions about Bridgman’s passport, and learned that Bridgman had one. That meant Ray could not use the Bridgman name to obtain a new passport, but he thought he might still be useful as a guarantor.⁴² That same day, April 12, newspapers reported the FBI was looking for a thirty-six-year-old white Alabama resident, Eric S. Galt, for questioning in connection with the King assassination.⁴³

A few days after calling Bridgman, and evidently after several failed attempts to reach other men whose names he had gathered from the newspaper archives, Ray talked to Ramon George Sneyd, a thirty-five-year-old policeman (Ray did not know his profession).⁴⁴ Again pretending to be a passport official, Ray asked a question about Sneyd’s passport, only to discover he did not have one. He had found the name under which to apply.*⁴⁵

On April 14, the Bridgman birth certificate arrived at Ray’s Ossington Avenue rooming house. That was surprising, because unbeknownst to Ray, Mrs. Szpakowska had not understood him when he said his name was Bridgman, and she said she had twice told callers from the Registrar’s Office that Bridgman did not live there.46 When the letter arrived for Bridgman, she gave it back to the postman, saying that she did not know the name.*

Around this time, Ray had a freak run-in with the police, one that could easily have led to his arrest if the officer had been more alert. A few blocks from his rooming house, Ray was stopped by a policeman who cited him for jaywalking.⁴⁷ As he wrote the summons, he asked Ray for his name. Ray was afraid to give Bridgman or Sneyd in case he was asked for identification, and Galt had already been named as the man wanted for questioning in the King murder. However, Ray “gave him the Galt name because that’s what I had the driver’s license and everything.”⁴⁸ When asked for an address, Ray gave one he had picked up during his correspondence with women through the lonely hearts club magazine a few months earlier.⁴⁹ “I got a bunch of these addresses out of the Lonely Hearts Magazine,” he recalled. “I was using these addresses if the police stopped me and they wanted to know where I was.”⁵⁰

When he returned to the rooming house after that incident, he destroyed all his Galt identification.⁵¹ He also disposed of all other documents he thought were incriminating, including the business card he claimed to have found in his Mustang in 1967 with the name Randy Rosenson on it, and also the scrap of paper on which purportedly he had kept Raoul’s New Orleans and Baton Rouge telephone numbers.⁵²

Tuesday, April 16, was a busy day for Ray. First, he rented a new room at another run-down rooming house, at 962 Dundas Street, on the edge of Toronto’s red-light district. He noticed a FOR RENT sign in the window, paid nine dollars for a week’s rent, and agreed to move in on the nineteenth.^†53 The landlady was thirty-two-year-old Sun Fung Loo, who knew even less English than Mrs. Szpakowska.

Ray needed a new address because he had another letter ready to send to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, this time requesting a copy of Ramon George Sneyd’s birth certificate.⁵⁴ Ray was fearful of listing the Ossington Avenue address for Sneyd as he had for Bridgman, on the chance that if the same clerk handled both requests, it might seem unusual. Now, armed with the Dundas Street address, Ray sent off his request for Sneyd. Later that day, he appeared at the office of the Kennedy Travel Bureau, one of Toronto’s most respected travel agencies. He explained to Lillian Spencer, the manager, that he wanted to buy a ticket but that he did not have a passport, nor did he have his birth certificate with him.55 He had lived in Toronto years ago, but did not think he could locate anyone who could vouch for him.⁵⁶ At first he asked about a round-trip ticket to South Africa, but that cost $820, so instead he settled on a twenty-one-day excursion round-trip ticket to London, for $345. That he could not afford to buy the ticket he wanted to South Africa is solid evidence that if Ray had killed King in the hope of collecting a bounty, he had not yet received it while in Toronto.*

It was at that travel agency that Ray learned the good news that he was mistaken about needing a guarantor to obtain a Canadian passport. Spencer informed him that Canada actually had an extremely simple process for obtaining a passport (the law was later tightened due to the ease with which Ray obtained one).⁵⁷ Ray only had to complete a passport application together with a Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor. The form required that he swear he had been born in Canada, and it further stated: “There is no one in Canada, eligible under the Canadian passport regulations to vouch for passport applications, who knows me well enough to vouch for my application. The reason for this is:” Ray then wrote, “I have been in Toronto only three weeks.”

He said he was single and had never before applied for a passport, listed his new rooming house on Dundas Street as his permanent address, and said that he was five-eight, 168 pounds, with black hair and blue eyes, and that he was a car salesman with a scar over his nose. To the question “Person to Notify in Canada in Case of Emergency,” he wrote, “Mr. Paul Bridgman, 102 Ossington Avenue, Toronto, a Friend.” Ray signed all the forms as Ramon George Sneyd.⁵⁸

Henry Moos, the travel agency’s owner, notarized both forms, and sent them out the next day, with Ray’s pictures and a five-dollar money order he had provided, to the passport office in Ottawa.⁵⁹

Before he left the agency, Miss Spencer helped him pick his travel dates. His passport might take ten days to two weeks, she told him. Ray selected Monday, May 6, the first day he could leave under the rules of his excursion ticket, for his departure. She booked him on BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) flight 600 to London. Before he left, Spencer told him that when he returned to pick up the passport, he would need to pay for his tickets, and also have proof that he had had a vaccination.*

The next day, April 17, the FBI issued a fugitive warrant for Eric Starvo Galt, wanted for conspiracy in the death of Dr. King.⁶⁰ Fortunately for Ray, while the news was international, the hunt was still focused in the United States. Moreover, the first photo available was the bartending graduation photo of Ray, with his eyes closed. It did not look very much like him. Accompanying that on most stories was the same picture with the eyes drawn in by an FBI sketch artist. That looked even less like Ray. Among many who had seen Ray—including Peter Cherpes, the Birmingham rooming house manager; Bessie Brewer, the manager at the Memphis rooming house; and William Paisley, who sold Ray his Mustang—few thought that the man with the bow tie looked like the man with whom they had dealt.

The news of the warrant hit the Canadian newspapers on April 18. The Toronto Star carried it on the front page. One of the few people who thought the photo looked like someone she knew was Mrs. Szpakowska, the landlady at the Ossington Avenue rooming house. “Bridgman is the man who killed Martin Luther King,” she announced to her husband. Fortunately for Ray, Szpakowska’s husband thought she was crazy and refused to allow her to call the police.⁶¹ By the next day, Ray had moved out. When Szpakowska went to his room to clean it, she noticed he had left the newspaper on the bed, open to the same photograph.⁶²

The day that Ray moved into the Dundas Street rooming house, Friday, April 19, the FBI announced that Eric S. Galt was really James Earl Ray. It was bad news for Ray. But fortunately for him, he was now in a house with a Chinese landlady, her husband, and three small children whose English was not only poor but who also seemed to pay no attention to English-language news reports. Loo said that Ray basically stayed in his room. However, on Sunday evening, April 21, he did leave. He knew it was the night that the widely popular television program The F.B.I. was on, and since his Dundas Street room did not have a television, he wanted to find a bar that had the show. He expected finally to be on the FBI’s ten most-wanted list. The first three bars he visited had their televisions tuned to The Ed Sullivan Show, but the fourth had it tuned to The F.B.I. Ray sat at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka and orange juice.

“Good evening. The FBI is engaged in a nationwide search to locate James Earl Ray, also known as Eric Starvo Galt, in connection with the fatal shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ray, an escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary, is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, 174 pounds, has brown hair, blue eyes, and a medium build. Consider him armed and extremely dangerous. If you have seen Ray, notify the FBI immediately.”

None of the other customers recognized the plain-looking man just feet away from them.63

Although Ray had expected it, the announcement was still sobering. The size of the reward by the city of Memphis and the Scripps-Howard newspapers—$100,000—startled him. He had not foreseen that Memphis, where he thought King had caused so much trouble, would put up such a large amount of money to bring in his killer.⁶⁴

The next day, Monday, April 22, Ray left by bus for Montreal, where he thought he might find a ship that would take him abroad without insisting on a passport.⁶⁵ He took a room on the opposite side of town from where he had lived in 1967. “I was going to rent passage on a ship that sailed around the coast of South Africa and try to slip in at one of the stops or get overboard and swim to shore.”⁶⁶ A Scandinavian liner offered a $600 ticket to Mozambique, but required a passport, so he had to pass. While in Montreal, Ray heard that Canadian authorities had detained some men who resembled him. That scared him. As a result, “I never left the room except for meals.” He gave the landlord the name Walters and used a phony name and address at the shipping office.⁶⁷ On April 26, he returned to Toronto, and paid nine dollars to Mrs. Loo for another week’s rent.*⁶⁸

On April 29, he visited a doctor to get the required vaccinations.⁶⁹ On Thursday, May 2, he telephoned the Kennedy Travel Bureau and learned that his passport was ready. He went there that afternoon, paid $345 Canadian cash for the ticket, and picked up his travel documents.*⁷⁰ When he saw the passport, he was disappointed because the name had been misspelled as Ramon George Sneya.⁷¹ (On Ray’s application, his D for Sneyd could easily be mistaken as an A.) Now his passport did not match his birth certificate. Moreover, the name under his photo on the passport said Sneyd, but the title page had the misspelling. Lillian Spencer, the agency’s manager, checked with Ottawa and told him she could have it corrected in three days. But when he returned on May 4, she had forgotten to send it off.⁷² Ray had no option but to travel with the misspelled passport, hoping that he might be able to fix it abroad.

On Monday, May 6, Mrs. Loo discovered that Ray had moved out. In his room, he had left behind a blue overnight bag. It contained a small metal strongbox; six rolls of unopened movie film; some Band-Aids; cold cream; maps of Toronto, Montreal, and Canada; and three sex magazines bought at a reduced price from a local back-issue store. She put the bag aside in case he returned, and after his capture she turned it over to the police.⁷³

Meanwhile, Ray caught BOAC flight 600 to London at 6:00 P.M. He landed at 6:40 A.M. on Tuesday, May 7.

“When I arrived in London I called the Portugerse Embassy about a visa to Angola,” wrote Ray. “I was told it would take one day to process. I then took a plane to Lisbon, and spent most of the time there trying to get a ship to Angola. (I was going from Angola into one of the English speaking countries if I could not get a job their).”⁷⁴

Ray’s flight to Lisbon had left at 10:55 the same night he had arrived at Heathrow. He had exchanged the return portion of his excursion trip from Toronto, and even received a fourteen-dollar refund in addition to the ticket to Portugal. During the two-and-a-half hour flight he sat by himself. He arrived in Lisbon at 1:15 A.M. on May 8.75 At customs, the clerk, Antonio Rocha Fama, warned him to correct the misspelling in his passport, which he promised to do.⁷⁶ Ray found his way to the third-class Hotel Portugal. There he rented a $1.80-a-day room.⁷⁷

Lisbon was a sensible stopover, considering Ray’s desire to get to white Africa. The Portuguese capital had become a major European recruiting center for white mercenaries who wanted to fight in the war in Angola. But finding a ship or a mercenary unit was easier said than done.

Gentil Soares, the clerk at the Hotel Portugal, remembered Ray as someone who was unfriendly, never used room service, and never tipped. He walked through with his head usually cast down, never made or received any telephone calls, and was never with any other men. He did, however, try to bring prostitutes back to the hotel, but when told he could not have women in his room, he left with them.⁷⁸ One, Gloria Sausa Riseiro, spent a night with him, and she remembered that he was obsessed with buying British and American newspapers. She did not know what he read in the papers. Since he spoke no Portuguese and she spoke no English, she told the authorities they spoke “only the international language of love.”⁷⁹

Ray frequented numerous bars near his hotel: the Texas, Bolero, Niagara, Galo, Bar Bohemia, and Fontoria Nightclub.⁸⁰ Most were hangouts for sailors. On his eighth day in Lisbon, “I finally found a ship, a one way ticket cost 3,777 Escudos [$131], I then went to get a visa but was told it would take 7 days to process the visa, the ship was leaving in two days, so I missed the ship.”⁸¹

He then checked with South African Airways (SAA) and picked up a timetable. After his arrest, Ray still had the SAA timetable, with a checkmark next to the schedule for Salisbury, Rhodesia.⁸² He also visited the South African Embassy. There he identified himself as a Canadian and said he wanted to go to South Africa to search for his brother, who was fighting somewhere in Africa as a mercenary. Was there an organization in South Africa that recruited mercenaries, and therefore might be able to help him? The embassy officials informed him that the mercenary recruiting office had closed in Johannesburg and they did not know where it had relocated.⁸³

Ray also visited the Rhodesian mission, spun the same story, and asked for an address of an organization in Salisbury that recruited mercenaries, but he received no assistance.⁸⁴ He then went to the unofficial legation for Biafra, which had broken away from Nigeria and was headquartered in Lisbon. He again asked about joining a white mercenary group in Africa, but the legation could not help him.*⁸⁵

As his funds dwindled, Ray decided to return to London because he found it easier to operate in an English-speaking country.86 Before leaving, he visited the Canadian Embassy on Wednesday, May 15, and tried to cancel his incorrect passport and have a new one issued. Manuela Lopes, the consular clerk, remembered Ray said he “did not want to spend all of his time waiting around the Embassy.”⁸⁷ She helped him fill in the forms. He needed so much help that she concluded he was not well educated. Aubrey Morantz, the embassy’s second secretary, checked and approved Sneyd’s documents, including his birth certificate.⁸⁸ Earlier, he had had passport photos taken at the nearby Foto Lusitania.⁸⁹ Ray picked up the new passport on Thursday, May 16, and left the next day for London.⁹⁰ He would still have to show his canceled passport together with his new one when passing through customs.⁹¹

Back in London, he settled into a cheap hotel named Heathfield House, in the Earl’s Court neighborhood, an area filled with Australians and Americans.⁹²

On Tuesday afternoon, June 4, Ian Colvin, a journalist in the Foreign Room of London’s Daily Telegraph, found a note at his typewriter. “A Mr. Sneyd called, will call later.”⁹³ At 5:00 P.M., the phone rang. “This is Ramon Sneyd. I want to join my brother who has been in Angola.”⁹⁴ Ray said he was a Canadian who had read Colvin’s articles about mercenaries in Africa. He sounded nervous and wanted the telephone number of Major Alistair Wicks, former second in command of the Five Commando unit in the Congo, who was mentioned in one of Colvin’s articles.⁹⁵ Ray claimed that his brother was missing and he hoped that Wicks might put him in touch with a group who could help locate him.⁹⁶

Colvin was wary of giving out any information about Wicks, and instead offered to pass along Sneyd’s number. By then, Ray had moved to the New Earl’s Court Hotel, and he gave that number. He had stayed at the Heathfield for ten days, moving on May 28. While there, he had received no mail, telephone calls, or visitors.

Two days after the first call to Colvin, Ray called again. He had not heard from Wicks, he complained, and wanted Colvin to know that he had again moved, this time to the Hotel Pax. Colvin had indeed passed along Ray’s message to Wicks, but Wicks did not recognize the name and had decided not to return the call.⁹⁷ This time Colvin questioned his caller and Sneyd admitted that his brother was not really missing, but that he had not heard from him in four months. Then Sneyd admitted that it was not so much that he wanted to search for his brother, but he actually wanted to become a mercenary himself.⁹⁸ Their conversation was interrupted several times because Sneyd was calling from a pay phone and often got disconnected when his money ran out, forcing him to redial. It was a bad time to join the mercenaries, Colvin explained, as both the British and African governments frowned on them. Anyway, he told Sneyd, the place to get information was not London but Brussels. While he did not have the information at hand, he would be happy to send Sneyd the address of Jean Gerard-Liebro, someone in touch with affairs in the Congo.

Almost the moment he hung up, Colvin felt uneasy about his caller. Sneyd seemed “overwrought and somewhat incoherent,” and instead of sending the information about Gerard-Liebro, he instead forwarded a simple postcard suggesting that Sneyd contact the Belgian Embassy.99

At the New Earl’s Court Hotel, the receptionist, Janet Nassau, remembered that Ray was trying to trace a Major Wicks about whom he had read. She liked her new guest and sometimes tried to talk to him, but found him incredibly shy.¹⁰⁰ She and some others tried to assist him on Wicks, but “he was so incoherent nobody seemed able to help him.” On June 4, after Ray called Colvin from a pay phone a few feet from the lobby’s main desk, he asked Nassau about his bill for the first week. He was worried because he was running low on money. “I’ll have to go to my bank and make a withdrawal,” he told her.¹⁰¹

That afternoon, one of the tellers in the Fulham branch of the Trustee Savings Bank looked up to see a white man with large sunglasses, wearing a blue suit, standing in front of her window. He pushed a small, pink paper bag toward her with a handwritten notation, “Place all £5–10 pound notes in this bag.”¹⁰² The teller could see the tip of a pistol between the fingers of one of his hands. She grabbed £105 (then equivalent to $240) and pushed the bills over the counter. He pocketed them and slowly walked out, leaving the bag behind. Later, it was discovered that the bag had James Earl Ray’s right thumbprint on it.*¹⁰³ That Ray risked a robbery in England is further evidence that he had not yet received any money for having killed King. When he was arrested only four days later, he had just over £51 (about $117). He told Huie that his major error while on the run was not to have committed a crime when he was hiding in Canada between April 22 and May 6. “That’s where I made my mistake,” he insisted. “I should have pulled a holdup. But I didn’t. And I let myself get on that plane to London without enough money to get where I intended to go.”¹⁰⁴

After robbing the bank, Ray checked out of the New Earl’s Court Hotel, telling Nassau that he was leaving for the airport. Actually, he went looking, in the midst of a violent rainstorm, for another room. The YMCA was full, and he was directed to the nearby Pax Hotel in Pimlico. The Pax was a private house, but its owner, Swedish-born Anna Thomas, let out several rooms. At 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, June 5, she opened her door. Ray was standing there dripping wet in a beige raincoat, a suitcase in one hand and books and newspapers under his other arm. Introducing himself as Sneyd, he took a room for $3.60 a day, including breakfast. Before he settled in, he complained of a bitter headache, and she gave him some aspirin.105

When Thomas brought his breakfast the next morning at 7:45 and knocked on his door, there was no answer, so she left the tray. When she began walking away, she saw him open the door.¹⁰⁶ He was fully dressed and took the tray without saying a word.¹⁰⁷ He followed the same routine for the next two mornings, and stayed in his room except for briefly going out each day to buy some newspapers. On the second day she asked him to sign the hotel register, but he did not, only telling her again that his name was Sneyd, and this time adding that he planned to go to Germany.¹⁰⁸ While he was there, he received four telephone calls. Two were from a British European Airways representative about changes in his flight schedule, and the other two did not leave any message.*¹⁰⁹ Thomas took the messages and slipped them under his door. One day when he left to buy headache pills, she went into his room to tidy up. She noticed that he had washed his own shirts, and on the bed were newspapers open to the extensive news about the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.¹¹⁰

At 9:30 A.M. on Saturday, June 8, Ray seemed particularly harried when he paid his bill, and he left the rooming house in a rush with all his belongings.¹¹¹ About two hours later, at Heathrow Airport, Detective Sergeant Philip Birch would be waiting with the Watch List at the immigration desk in Terminal Two. Sixty-five days after he had fled the scene of the assassination, Ray’s luck had finally run out.

* Ray had recently received his long-overdue $140 refund check from Superior Film Company for the camera he had returned the previous October. He told the Select Com mittee that, afraid of cashing it, he also threw that check out the car window while returning to Atlanta. Later, he told the committee he held on to the check and actually got rid of it in Canada.

^† Harold Weisberg uses the absence of Ray’s prints on the car to raise conspiracy speculation: “Who drove it from Memphis to Atlanta if Ray’s fingerprints were not there to identify him as the driver?” Weisberg never mentions that Ray himself wiped them off the car.

‡ The Select Committee grilled Ray on why he had not taken his pistol with him to Memphis if he thought he was really going to be part of a gun deal with Mexican smug glers he had never met. He never had a satisfactory answer, finally saying, “I’m not able to articulate it.”

* Ray later said, “I think they [the smaller clothes] belonged to this guy they call him self Raoul.”

^† When asked why he risked taking the time to get his laundry, Ray told the Select Committee, “Well, I guess to have clean clothing, that’s all.”

‡ Szpakowska said Ray checked in April 8, not the sixth. But she did not maintain good records, and April 8 was based on what she recalled a couple of months later. It appears likely that Ray did check in on the sixth, and that Szpakowska did not mark his arrival until the eighth. Although less likely, if Szpakowska is right, Ray deliberately covered up a missing two days immediately after the assassination. That would almost certainly be the time in which he could have rendezvoused with his brothers. Jerry Ray claims he was at work then, but the work records are destroyed, and his credibility is highly suspect. John Ray had no alibi for those days.

* Since Ray thought he looked younger than he was, he looked at birth announcements for 1932, four years after his own birth date. He has given different versions of how many names he pulled during his search. In the 20,000 Words he said he found ten, but to the Select Committee he once said four or five, and another time three. In addition to the newspaper office, the name of which Ray has never remembered, at other times Ray contended he did the work at a library. Both afforded that type of research.

^† Ray’s plan was a risky one, but the only one he thought available. He intended to apply for the passport under one name, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and then return the next day and, without his glasses and with the second identification, go to another clerk and vouch for his “friend’s” passport application that had just been filed. He had even gone far enough in his planning that he “went to Brown’s Theatrical Supplies on Yonge Street and bought a makeup kit.”

* One of the mysteries of the case is that all four Canadians whose names Ray used before and after the assassination—Eric Galt, John Willard, Paul Bridgman, and Ramon George Sneyd—lived in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. Although newspaper accounts after the assassination said all four men lived within blocks of one another, they actually lived up to four miles apart. The men did not know one another. The four men never reported losing their identification or having any other problem with their names being appropriated. Three of the four, Galt, Bridgman, and Sneyd, bore a passing resemblance to Ray, which has raised the legitimate suspicion that the aliases were provided to Ray as part of an elaborate conspiracy. There is evidence, however, that despite his denials, Ray visually checked on the three who resembled him. A Toronto map was later found in Ray’s belongings, and while it was destroyed years later by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as part of their regular procedure for the destruction of files, reports about the map indicate it had marks near the homes of those three men, as well as marks along the public transportation route from Ray’s rooming house to Scarborough. Sophisticated plotters would have either been ready to dispose of Ray after King’s murder or to have had ready identification and travel papers for him.

* Szpakowska initially told the authorities that she had known Ray as Bridgman and had told him his letter was on the hallway table but he never picked it up, so she returned it to the postman. However, she later admitted to Huie that she did not know Ray’s name at all. Ray never knew what happened to the Bridgman birth certificate until Huie informed him after the assassination.

^† The fact that Ray asked to move in on the nineteenth is further evidence of the fact that he had probably moved into the Ossington Avenue rooming house on April 6, as he said, and not April 8 as Szpakowska remembered. The nineteenth would be the end of two weeks of rent at Ossington Avenue, and Ray was careful to watch his money in this period. Ray told Huie that he had less than $1,000 when he started his postassassination run and expected most of it to be spent on air travel.

* Ray asked for a round-trip ticket although he had no intention of returning to Canada once he arrived in England. However, he thought a round-trip would arouse less suspicion than a one-way ticket. The twenty-one-day excursion ticket bought by Ray was the cheapest available. Although $345 Canadian, it was only $275 U.S.

* Spencer said that Ray had one of those anonymous faces that faded quickly from memory. She told Huie, “Ray is not the sort of man one notices or remembers. A few minutes after he left the office his features had faded into the wallpaper for me.” This was, of course, one of Ray’s greatest attributes in blending into his surroundings and not standing out as a fugitive, even after his photos were published.

* Ray told the Select Committee that he stayed in Montreal until May 1, but not only did Mrs. Loo record the receipt of the rent on April 26; Ray also did other things in Toronto before May 1, all of which have been corroborated. Further, when Ray left for Montreal, he wrote to the Kennedy Travel Bureau, saying he was going to the town of Capreol, so that if they tried to contact him, they would realize he was out of town. Capreol is a small railroad town with some fishing lodges, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigated the area and determined Ray had not stopped there, but only in Montreal.

* Earlier that day, when Ray was in his room, a heavyset, middle-aged Caucasian appeared at the rear door and asked Mrs. Loo for “Mr. Sneyd.” She went upstairs and told Ray, who came down and greeted the visitor. Loo watched as they briefly spoke, and then the heavyset man passed an envelope to Ray. When the Toronto papers later learned of the visit, they dubbed the stranger the “Fat Man” and began a frenetic search for him. Most speculated that the envelope contained a payoff, especially since later that day Ray paid cash for his airline tickets. However, the “Fat Man” turned out to be Robert McDouldton (identified as the “Fat Man” for the first time here), a paint company salesman who worked in the Dundas Street area. He had used a public telephone booth and found an envelope addressed to Sneyd with no return address. Huie reports that Ray said the envelope contained the Sneyd birth certificate, which had finally arrived. Ray had carried the envelope in his jacket pocket, and when he called the travel agency from a phone booth, he had written the departure time on the back of the envelope. Then he walked away from the booth, leaving it there. Mrs. Loo later identified McDouldton as her visitor, and the Toronto police investigated and cleared him of any sinister association to Ray or the case (MURKIN 4351–4440, section 55, p. 146).

* There were some later reports that Ray had actually met two soldiers while at the legation and that one was black, which made him leave. He adamantly denied that.

* Ray has adamantly denied robbing the bank, but his fingerprint is irrefutable evidence that he did. The House Select Committee concluded that Ray, on May 27, had also tried unsuccessfully to rob a Paddington area jewelry store at about 5:30 P.M. Maurice and Billie Isaacs, the owners, later identified photos of Ray as the person who attempted to rob them at gunpoint (see MLK Exhibits F-238 and F-239). However, contemporaneous FBI documents indicate that Scotland Yard did not pursue its investigation of those robberies because they were “extremely fearful that if information re: the jewelry shop job and information implicating Ray in any other jobs leaks to the press, that Ray’s solicitor will insist Ray be charged in order to clear him of any or all jobs he allegedly committed. “That would have substantially delayed his extradition to the States for the King assassination. (MURKIN 4901–4982, section 66, p. 46.)

* Thomas thought they could have been from the Daily Telegraph. Although Colvin said he never called Ray, it is possible that Major Wicks or somebody else connected with the mercenaries may have finally returned a call, but after Ray’s arrest were embarrassed to admit it. Thomas thought one of the callers, a woman, sounded American. It is also possible that it was Carol Ray, James’s sister, checking on him—Carol and the rest of the family, of course, have consistently denied knowing his whereabouts when he was on the run, but considering the special bond among the Rays, it would not be surprising to discover that it was her or another family member.