Reporters who ended up on John Ray's doorstep similarly found that he was not bashful about sharing his views on King. "He was not a saint as they try to picture him," John would later write the author George McMillan. "King was not only a rat but with his beaded eyes and pin ears, he looked like one, too."
Initially considering John Ray a possible suspect in a conspiracy, FBI agents interrogated him about his whereabouts on April 4 but were unable, either then or in subsequent interviews, to pin anything definitive on him. (Years later, however, John Ray would boast651 in a co-authored book that he drove from St. Louis and visited his brother Jimmy at a tavern in West Memphis, Arkansas--just across the Mississippi River from the city--on the afternoon before the assassination.)
Meanwhile, a second team of agents soon found Ray's younger brother Jerry Ray at a country club in the Chicago suburbs, where he was a golf course greenskeeper. A clownish man who seemed to take the FBI's manhunt as a thrilling game, Jerry was determined to tell the agents only enough to keep them off his back. His brother Jimmy was now the "hottest man in the country,"652 Jerry reckoned, "the most wanted man there ever was."
Jerry, who was also a felon, said he had no idea where Jimmy went to, or even if he was still alive. He doubted his brother had it in him to kill anyone, though. If Jimmy murdered King, it had to be for money. "He sure didn't have any love653 for colored people," Jerry conceded. "But he wouldn't have put himself in a spot like this unless there was something in it for him."
Whatever Jimmy Ray did or did not do, Jerry said, he would never tell a soul about it. "Jimmy would never snitch on anyone, I know that. He'll go to his grave with his secrets."
FEELING THE STARE of the world boring at his back, Ramon Sneyd skulked through Toronto's darkened streets the night the bulletin ran on The FBI, and slipped into Mrs. Loo's place. He locked himself in his room for twenty-four hours and tried to figure out what to do next.
The following morning, April 23, he paid a visit to Loblaws, a grocery store only a few blocks away. Probably packing his .38 Liberty Chief revolver, Sneyd gave serious thought to robbing the joint. "A supermarket654--that's really a corporation's money and they're probably gougin' it out of somebody else, anyway," he later rationalized. "Better to rob them than an individual." Samuel Marshall, the assistant manager, found him in the rear of the store655 in an area off-limits to customers, snooping around near the office safe. Marshall demanded to know what he was doing there.
"Oh I, um, I'm looking for a job," the intruder stammered, boasting that he had some experience working in a grocery down in Mexico. When the store manager, Emerson Benns, approached, Sneyd edged toward the door, sprinted down the sidewalk, and hopped on a streetcar. The following day Marshall saw James Earl Ray's photograph in Newsweek and alerted police, saying, "That's the man."
Sneyd, prudently deciding he should keep himself scarce from the Dundas neighborhood for a while, headed for the bus station a few hours after his contretemps at Loblaws supermarket and boarded a coach for Montreal. He feared that the Sneyd passport application might fall through, or worse, that it might trip some internal bureaucratic alarm in Ottawa; in any case, he recognized that it was far too risky for him to stick around Toronto for two weeks until his airplane ticket and passport arrived.
In Montreal, he stayed in a rooming house under the name of Walters and wandered the shipyards for several days hunting in vain for a freighter that might take him to southern Africa. Sneyd did find a Scandinavian ship bound for Mozambique with a fare of six hundred dollars, but was disappointed to learn that the line's regulations required all passengers to carry a valid passport.
In desperation, Sneyd returned to Toronto and kept to his room at Mrs. Loo's place for a week. His Sneyd birth certificate arrived in due course, but in his agitated state he made another potentially critical mistake: while placing a call at a nearby phone booth, he absentmindedly left the Bureau of Vital Statistics envelope, holding his Sneyd birth certificate, on the little ledge by the phone. Later that day, Mrs. Loo opened the door and beheld a rotund man656 clutching an envelope. She hollered up to Mr. Sneyd to tell him he had a caller, but her skittish tenant wouldn't budge from his room. When she bounded up the stairs and coaxed Sneyd to come out, Mrs. Loo thought he looked nervous and "white as a sheet." Sneyd feared the worst: it must be a government official, a plainclothes cop, or a detective. In the foyer, Sneyd awkwardly spoke to the fat stranger, who turned out to be a paint company salesman named Robert McNaulton who'd spotted the official-looking document in the phone booth and, trying to do the right thing, had hand-delivered it to the Dundas address clearly typed on the outside of the envelope.
On May 2, Sneyd called the Kennedy Travel Bureau and to his profound relief learned from Lillian Spencer that his airline ticket and passport had finally arrived. But when he went over to the travel agency to pick up the documents, he fell into a mild panic: his surname was misspelled on the passport. It said "Sneya" instead of "Sneyd"--the result, no doubt, of his poor handwriting in his haste to fill out the application. It was too late to fix the error--his flight was scheduled to leave in a few days. He paid for the ticket, $345 Canadian, in cash.
On May 6, Sneyd quit Mrs. Loo's establishment, giving no advance notice, saying only that he was leaving because the children who constantly played outside his room were too noisy. While cleaning up the room, Mrs. Loo found a small suitcase that only contained a few odd things--some Band-Aids, a couple of sex magazines, maps of Toronto and Montreal, and six rolls of unopened Super 8 movie film. Loo stashed the bag in her storeroom, guessing that Mr. Sneyd might eventually return for it.
Checking in at Toronto International Airport later that afternoon as Ramon George Sneya, the world's most wanted fugitive boarded British Overseas Airways Flight 600. The jet took off without incident at 6:00 p.m., and Sneyd breathed a sigh of relief. But as the plane cruised out over the North Atlantic, his mind churned with worries, mainly having to do with his thinning reserve of cash. "I should have pulled a holdup657 in Canada," he later said, regretfully. "That's where I made my mistake. I let myself get on that plane to London without enough money to get where I intended to go."
At 6:40 the next morning, May 7, Sneyd's flight touched down at London Heathrow, the next stop in his long, strange journey toward Rhodesia.
42 RESURRECTION CITY
IN THE FIRST week of May, J. Edgar Hoover and Cartha DeLoach became distracted by another development, one that was separate from, but not entirely unrelated to, the hunt for James Earl Ray. When King was assassinated in Memphis, he had regarded the garbage strike as a miniature of the larger fight he was planning to wage in Washington--the Poor People's Campaign.
The POCAM, as the FBI called it, had been one of Hoover's dreads all along, and the mayhem caused by the assassination riots in Washington only seemed to validate his warnings that a mass convergence of angry indigents on the nation's capital would be a formula for certain violence.
King's death had momentarily taken the wind out of the SCLC's plans; deprived of his charismatic oratory and his judicious leadership, such an ambitious enterprise as the Poor People's Campaign seemed unlikely to happen. But by late April, Ralph Abernathy announced that his organization was going ahead with King's grand protest. Through deft negotiations, the SCLC secured a monthlong permit from the National Park Service to build a sprawling shantytown encampment on sixteen acres of the Mall, in West Potomac Park, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of the poor were planning to converge on Washington in what Andy Young predicted would be "the greatest nonviolent demonstration658 since Gandhi's salt march." In honor of King, the shantytown would be called Resurrection City--a name that would symbolize, Young said, "the idea of rebirth659 from the depths of despair."
Now, it seemed, Hoover's nightmare was about to begin.
All across the country, masses of the destitute--the Poor People's Army--were forming caravans and aiming toward
Washington. Just as King had originally envisioned it, they were not only African-Americans but also poor whites from Appalachia, Hispanics from Los Angeles, Puerto Ricans from New York, and Native Americans from all over the country--Seneca, Hopi, Flatheads, Yakama, Sioux.
The eight great caravans got their symbolic kickoff in Memphis on May 2. Returning to the site of her husband's assassination, Coretta King stood outside room 306 at the Lorraine, which was now glassed in and adorned with wreaths. A gold cross had been cemented into the balcony floor, and a plaque nearby bore a passage from Genesis. "Behold," it said, "here cometh the dreamer ... let us slay the dreamer and we shall see what will become of his dreams." At Mason Temple later that day, Coretta and Ralph Abernathy blessed the marchers, and they took off toward Marks, Mississippi, the tiny town deep in the Delta where King had seen so much despair on the faces of sharecroppers.
From Marks, the pilgrims transformed themselves into a mule caravan, with teams of farm animals pulling wooden carts of the sort widely used, until very recently, by sharecroppers in the South. Facetiously, Abernathy gave all the mules nicknames like Eastland and Stennis--in honor of staunch segregationist senators and congressmen in Washington. The mule-team marchers gathered more and more followers as they inched east on back roads toward Alabama, where state troopers vowed to arrest the caravan for endangering public safety.
Much of Alabama--or at least white Alabama--was in a period of mourning: on May 7, Governor Lurleen Wallace had finally succumbed to colon cancer at the age of forty-one. George Wallace, who'd been riding a tidal wave of support across the country, was now so distraught that many assumed he would drop out of the presidential race. Lurleen Wallace's body lay in the rotunda660 of the state capitol in Montgomery--the same spot where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had lain in state. The Poor People's Army rolled past the surreal sight of Confederate flags flying at half-staff and beefy highway patrolmen in tears over the loss of their lady governor. In Birmingham, the mule teams would be put on trailers to be trucked the rest of the way to D.C.
As the caravans drew ever closer, planners in Washington began to build the great tent city. Hundreds of A-frame structures, made of canvas and plywood, began to go up in sight of the Reflecting Pool. There would be electric lines, water lines,661 sewage lines, phone lines, and a central structure called City Hall for "Mayor" Ralph Abernathy. Resurrection City would even have its own ZIP code.
Hoover, meanwhile, girded his FBI for the imminent "assault on Washington," as he called it. He had informers embedded in all the different caravans and agents bird-dogging every militant group. He urged all the SACs around the country to consider Project POCAM "one of the bigger tasks662 facing the bureau at the present time."
Pentagon generals were prepared to deploy twenty thousand troops to put down any possible insurrection. President Johnson was personally offended by the Poor People's Campaign; it seemed a direct indictment of his vaunted Great Society programs, which had foundered as the war in Vietnam had escalated. Ramsey Clark said the notion of a shantytown going up beside the White House "hurt the president--deeply hurt him."663
On Capitol Hill, many senators were apoplectic at the prospect of this invasion of "welfare brood mares," as some conservatives called the Poor People's Army. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas led the charge, saying that Washington was about to be transformed into a "Mecca for migrants"664 and claiming to possess inside knowledge that black militants had a secret "master plan" for the violent overthrow of the national government.
As the tattered army of pilgrims and mules drew near, the mood in Washington, Clark said, had become "one of paranoia665--literally. There were predictions of holocaust, and absurdly improbable testimony on the Hill about clandestine meetings and planned violence. The nation was led to expect horrible crimes."
AT FBI HEADQUARTERS during the first week of May, the search for James Earl Ray appeared to be going nowhere but backward--back into the creases of Ray's biography, back into the mix of stunting environments and stifling influences, back into the genesis stories of a lifelong criminal. By relentlessly interviewing and reinterviewing Ray's family and acquaintances, the FBI had hoped that some stray piece of information would break loose, some random fact that would lead agents to Ray's hiding place. But the strategy didn't work. Instead, the FBI men, with journalists following close on their heels, began to assemble something altogether different: an exceedingly strange and sad portrait of a man who'd grown up in a cluster of depressed towns along the Mississippi River, in the heart of Twain country. It was a severe story, a heartbreaking story--but one that was thoroughly American.
The Ray clan had a hundred-year history666 of crime and squalor and hard luck. Ray's great-grandfather was an all-around thug who sold liquor to Indians off the back of a wagon and was hanged after gunning down six men. Ray's beloved uncle Earl was a traveling carnival boxer and convicted rapist who served a six-year prison sentence for throwing carbolic acid in his wife's face.
Throughout James Earl Ray's life, the despair was panoramic. The family suffered from exactly the sort of bleak, multigenerational poverty that King's Poor People's Campaign was designed to address. Living on a farm near tiny Ewing, Missouri, the Rays were reportedly forced to cannibalize their own house667 for firewood to get through the winter--ripping it apart, piece by piece, until the sorry edifice fell in on itself and they had to move on, to a succession of equally shabby dwellings up and down the Mississippi.
The Ray children, predictably, were a mess. John, Jimmy, and Jerry were all felons, but that was just the start of the family's disappointments. In the spring of 1937, Ray's six-year-old sister, Marjorie, burned herself to death while playing with matches. The two youngest Ray siblings, Max (who was mentally disabled) and Susie, were given up for adoption after Ray's father abandoned the family in 1951. A decade later, Ray's kindhearted but overwhelmed mother, Lucille, then fifty-one, died in St. Louis from cirrhosis of the liver. Two years after that, Ray's eighteen-year-old brother, Buzzy, missed the bridge in Quincy, Illinois, and plunged his car into a slough of the Mississippi River, drowning himself and his girlfriend.
Then there was Melba--perhaps the saddest and most disheveled of the Ray children. An emotionally disturbed woman who shouted obscenities at strangers and spent much of her time in mental hospitals, Melba made local news a year before, in 1967, when she was found dragging a painted, seven-foot cross down a major street in Quincy. "I made it to keep my sanity,"668 she said, by way of explanation. "After what happened to President Kennedy and the war and all, I had to turn to Jesus."
Melba, when interviewed, said she hardly knew her older brother James Earl. "He liked being clean,"669 she dimly recalled. "He always kept his hair combed."
As the FBI agents took note of the misery that pervaded the Ray family history, the biggest question mark was Ray's father. Who was the patriarch of all this pathos? Whatever happened to the man? On prison forms at both Leavenworth and Jeff City, James Earl Ray had consistently declared his father "deceased," noting that he'd died of a heart attack in 1947. But soon the FBI learned that, on the contrary, Ray's sixty-nine-year-old father was alive and well and living as a recluse on a little farm in Center, Missouri, not far from Twain's childhood home of Hannibal.
Special Agents William Duncan and James Duffey670 showed up at Old Man Ray's tiny clapboard house, located on a plot of pasture just beyond the town dump, and conducted a series of highly unusual interviews. Ray was a tough and watchful little bantam rooster, quick to warn of guns lying about; despite his advanced years, he was proud of his physique, which had been honed to hardness from years of weight lifting and calisthenics. At first he denied that his name was Ray--it was Jerry Raynes, he insisted. He also denied that the fugitive was his son. "Stepson," he claimed. "Anyways, I haven't seen Jimmy in seventeen years."
After a while, though, especially when Agent Duffey reminded him of the harsh provisions of the "harboring statute," the old man opened up a l
ittle. When a succession of reporters came knocking on his door in the weeks and months ahead, he opened up a little more. Raynes turned out to be the sort of guy who, once he got started, wouldn't shut up. He spoke so slowly that people thought he had a speech impediment. When he was a kid, his languorous drawl earned him what became his lifelong nickname: Speedy.
Yes, it was true, Speedy said, he'd been born George "Jerry" Ray back in 1899, but over the years he'd changed his name to Ryan, Raines, Raynes, Rayns, and assorted other spellings. As he dabbled in petty crimes (breaking and entering, forgery, bootlegging), and as he drifted from job to job (railroad brakeman, farmer, junk hauler), he'd kept his identity deliberately fungible, the better to confuse the tax man and escape the clutches of creditors and landlords and the law. His policy of existential vagueness had confused the kids, too--so much so that some of them were adults before they knew their true names.
And yes, James Earl Ray was his son. Old Man Ray seemed proud of the boy. Of all his kids, he said, Jimmy was the smart and ambitious one, the one destined for big things. "He was thinking all the time,"671 Speedy told a reporter. "Jimmy wanted to be a detective. He'd pick up anything right now and learn it. He had a hell of a lot of drive. He'd tell you he was going right to the top, you know." Yet there was something odd about the boy, too, Speedy admitted. "Jimmy had funny ways about him. Like, he used to walk on his hands. Hell, he could even run on his hands."
Speedy Raynes was a muddle of superstitions and rants--tenaciously held ideas that he pummeled into Jimmy's adolescent head while they drove around Ewing together, shooting pool in taverns, hauling junk up and down the Fabius River valley. Speedy wouldn't eat Chinese food, he said, because "those people will poison you."672 He believed all baseball games were fixed, that doctors were determined to kill you, that pretty much everything in life was a racket. "All politicians are thieves673 and gangsters," he said. "Well, maybe not Wallace. But when the government gets after anybody, they don't have a chance."