Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Other commentator-sleuths went in a different direction. Could the name Eric Starvo Galt be a glancing reference to the most famous super-villain then populating the pages of international spy fiction? In several Ian Fleming novels, including On Her Majesty's Secret Service, James Bond's arch nemesis is Ernst Stavro Blofeld, an evil genius who leads a criminal organization called SPECTRE that's bent on "a most diabolical plot for murder on a mass scale." In the 007 films, Ernst Stavro Blofeld--a.k.a. Number 1--was depicted as a bald man in a Nehru getup; he had a hideous facial scar and was usually seen stroking a white Persian cat.

  True crime growing from the pages of fiction? It didn't make much sense, but its pull was irresistible. All over the country, people began to comb through Bond thrillers and Ayn Rand books, underlining key phrases, hunting for esoteric clues. FBI agents even got in on the research. If nothing else, the allusions to James Bond and John Galt cemented early on the notion that the killer was part of a shadowy and well-oiled international conspiracy--a SPECTRE-like syndicate--that made him seem all the more exotic and mysterious.

  IN TORONTO, Eric Galt's photograph was plastered on page one of the morning Star. The large headline read: FBI SAYS THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY--MYSTERIOUS SEAMAN SOUGHT IN KING DEATH. When Mrs. Szpakowski saw the picture that morning, April 18, she instantly thought of her roomer. She stared and stared at the photograph with the weird eyes, studying it from all angles. She thought about the man who called himself Paul Bridgman, his odd habits, his nervousness, his seeming addiction to newspapers. All morning she fretted over what to do. She showed a copy of the Star to her husband, Adam. Pointing toward the ceiling, she said, "He is the man who killed638 Martin Luther King."

  Who is the man? What are you talking about?

  "Paul Bridgman," she said. "The man upstairs. He's the killer they've been looking for."

  "You're crazy in the head," Adam told his wife.

  "But he looks just like him. We should call the police," she insisted.

  "Fela, you're crazy. You'll only make a fool of yourself."

  Mrs. Szpakowski relented. She never picked up the phone. Burying her suspicions, she went about her chores for the day. Then, while making the rounds the following morning, she learned that Paul Bridgman, without any notice, had vacated his room. He'd left his key on the table in the foyer. When she cleaned his room, Mrs. Szpakowski found an edition of the Toronto Star sitting on the bed, with the same picture of King's accused assassin. The image gave her a chill.

  THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they'd issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren't sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

  To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine--an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

  Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. "All the signs were there,"639 DeLoach said. "The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection."

  Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake's boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI's Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. "Les, we have pretty good evidence640 that Galt is an escapee," DeLoach said. "How many 'Wanted' notices do we currently have in our files?"

  "About 53,000," Trotter said.

  DeLoach grimaced. "Well," he said, "at least that's better than three million."

  The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake's men to compare the "Galt" prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. "You've got to put all your people on this," DeLoach said.

  "When do you want us to begin?" Trotter asked.

  "How about today?"

  The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn't need to remind them that "we're under tremendous pressure,641 and that our cities are powder kegs."

  Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt's left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake's project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt's thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.

  At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. "We're getting there,"642 Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn't slept a wink and that they'd already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. "Give us just a little more time."

  "OK," DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover's right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth--that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

  Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. "Deke," he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a "note of triumph" in Trotter's voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: "Tell the Director. We've got your man!"

  "Are you sure?"

  "No doubt about it. Bonebrake's experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card."

  "I take it he's not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard."

  "Nope," Trotter said. "His card number is 405,942G. The guy's a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray."

  BOOK THREE

  THE HOTTEST MAN IN THE COUNTRY

  Thy chase had a beast in view;

  Thy wars brought nothing about;

  Thy lovers were all untrue.

  'Tis well an old age is out,

  And time to begin a new.

  JOHN DRYDEN, "THE SECULAR MASQUE"

  41 THE TOP TEN

  AS THE FBI prepared to break the news around the world, Ramon George Sneyd kept a low profile in his digs on Toronto's Dundas Street West. For nearly a week, he refused to venture from his room. Sun Fung Loo, the Chinese lady who ran the place with a lax eye and a wide, gummy smile--and who usually had a small child strapped to her back--hardly ever saw her tenant. "He came with a suit on643 and a newspaper in his hand," she said. "He never spoke to anybody."

  Luckily for Sneyd, Mrs. Loo could neither speak nor read English and, unlike Mrs. Szpakowski, exhibited no interest in the careers and backgrounds of her roomers. She took his rent and left him alone.

  Paranoid, exhausted from worry, running out of money, Sneyd knew he must stay in a nerve-racking holding pattern for nearly two weeks while he waited for his passport, birth certifica
te, and airline ticket to arrive. At some point he bought a new cheap transistor radio to replace his trusty Channel Master, and from Dundas Street West he constantly monitored the airwaves for any news on the manhunt.

  On Sunday night, April 21, he did emerge from his room. The Loo rooming house had no television, and that night there was a particular show he wanted to watch--ABC's wildly popular series The FBI, which presented semi-fictionalized dramas spun from the FBI's actual case files. Sneyd visited several bars in the neighborhood and found to his dismay that they were all tuned to watch The Ed Sullivan Show, but eventually he found a tavern where the barkeep was willing to switch the tube to ABC, which came in over the rabbit ears from an affiliate station across Lake Ontario, in Buffalo, New York. Wearing his horn-rimmed glasses, Sneyd sat at the crowded bar,644 ordered a drink, and endeavored to stay in the shadows. He watched the one-hour show, which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in the role of Inspector Lewis Erskine. But what Sneyd had really come for was the little kicker that famously ended the program each week--in which the FBI presented the current list of the ten most wanted public enemies in America.

  Sure enough, Zimbalist's voice suddenly broke in over the airwaves--wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--and there was Sneyd's photograph, flashing across the screen. Only Zimbalist didn't say Sneyd's name. He didn't say Eric Galt's name, either, or Harvey Lowmeyer's, or John Willard's. Enunciating in his most orotund and officious-sounding baritone, Zimbalist named the name for all the world to hear: James Earl Ray.

  Sneyd must have felt a stab of terror that was sharpened by the fact that he could not show the slightest flinch of discomfort, in the loud and boisterous bar, lest he draw unwelcome attention to himself. "An escapee from the Missouri State Penitentiary, he is forty years old, five feet ten inches tall, 174 pounds. The FBI is engaged in a nationwide search but Ray may have fled to Mexico or Canada." Sneyd sat there during the awkward bulletin, nervously fidgeting with his vodka and orange juice. "Memphis has offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone with information leading to Ray's capture." Sneyd later confessed that he was astounded that a Southern city where King had stirred up so much trouble would put up so much money. More and more photographs flashed on the screen, images from a shabby criminal past that Sneyd found all too familiar. "Consider him armed and extremely dangerous. If you have seen Ray, notify the FBI immediately."

  THE "AMERICA'S MOST WANTED" bulletin had hit the airwaves as the result of a three-day spasm of activity in FBI offices around the United States. At frantic speed, agents had learned much about the life and times of James Earl Ray; they'd followed every lead, digested every stray scrap, tied up every loose end. Hoover, DeLoach, and Clark had no doubts--they had the right man.

  Yet they realized they needed to enlist the public to help with the search. So the FBI prepared a series of public service announcements to air on radio stations from coast to coast. The bureau also printed more than 200,000 "Wanted" notices and distributed them around the nation, while another 30,000, printed in Spanish, were plastered all over Mexico. The hunt was entering its most relentless phase.

  If there is such a thing as a "typical" assassin, the forty-year-old James Earl Ray didn't seem to meet the description--at least not on the surface. He was not a young male burning with religious fervor, and his racial politics, though smoldering and reactionary, had never led him to join the Klan or any other overtly violent organization. While his rap sheet was long, he had never been convicted of murder or manslaughter--or any crime that involved discharging a gun. While serving in the Army in Bremerhaven, Germany, just after World War II, he had learned to shoot an M1--earning the basic medal as a marksman--but certainly this was no professional hit man.

  Ray, above all, was a man who loved the chase, and who seemed almost subconsciously to want to get caught in order to break free again and thus initiate another chase. There was a bumbling picaresque quality to many of his escapades; in one of his heists, he fell out of his own swerving getaway car because he forgot to pull the door shut. A high-school dropout, Ray was discharged from the Army for "ineptness and lack of adaptability for military service." Most of his crimes--burglary, forgery, armed robbery--ranged from the petty to the merely pathetic. His criminal career was marked by moments of rash stupidity, yet Ray was not stupid, and he had a reputation in prison as a keen reader and a patient plotter with a perversely creative intelligence, especially when it came to confounding any sort of authority. Anyone who could break from a maximum-security prison and stay on the lam for more than a year possessed a certain kind of street cunning that was not to be dismissed.

  At various points in his life, Ray had tried to go straight. He'd been, among other things, a color matcher at a shoe company, a laborer at a tannery, an assembly line worker at a company that manufactured compressors, and a dishwasher at a diner. But he kept slipping deeper into a life of recidivism--it was the only world he knew. "He was a dirty little neck,"645 recalled William Peterson, police chief in the blue-collar town of Alton, Illinois, where Ray was born in 1928 and where he lived off and on between his jail terms. "He was a thief who slept all day and stole all night."

  FBI agents arrived at Jefferson City, Missouri, and began to piece together a thumbnail sketch646 of James Earl Ray's years in prison there and the story of his escape from the bakery a year earlier. Ray, investigators learned, was widely thought to have been using and selling amphetamines inside Jeff City--his role as a narcotics "merchant" was a likely source of funds that had sustained him during his year on the run. (By one close accounting made much later, Ray over the years may have sent out as much as seven thousand dollars he'd made in the narcotics trade--most likely salting it away with members of his family.) But mainly Ray was known as someone obsessed with the notion of escape. Nicknamed the Mole, Ray had tried to break out of Jeff City on several earlier occasions and, as punishment, was forced to serve many hard months in solitary. Though his several escape attempts should have permanently caught the attention of the prison staff, something about his style made him oddly forgettable, innocuous, generic. Most guards just called him by his prison number: 416-J.

  To the investigating agents, the vandalized numerals found on the Channel Master radio suddenly made sense. Specialists at the crime lab had successfully used an ultraviolet scanner to "raise" the numerals647 that Ray had so diligently scratched out. The number: 00416. Jeff City records showed that James Earl Ray had bought the radio from the prison canteen two days before his escape and that, as required by prison regulations, the number had been etched on the radio's housing.

  OTHER FBI MEN branched out across Missouri and Illinois, tracking down members of Ray's family. Both of Ray's parents were said to be dead, but agents soon found a brother, John Ray,648 at the bar he ran on Arsenal Street in a rough neighborhood of South St. Louis. The Grapevine Tavern was just a block away from the George Wallace for President headquarters, and was a frequent gathering place for campaign organizers. John Ray, it turned out, was a die-hard Wallace fan himself and freely used his bar to distribute American Independent Party literature. Because of its proximity to the Wallace office, the Grapevine had become known around town as a watering hole for John Birchers, White Citizens Council members, and other ardent segregationists. Much like his brother James Earl in Los Angeles, John Ray had a habit of personally escorting prospective AIP registrants to the local campaign headquarters to enlist them in the Wallace cause.

  John Ray seemed a beefier, ruddier version of the fugitive, with a fast-receding hairline that exposed the bony facades of his forehead. He had a criminal record of his own, having served seven years in an Illinois penitentiary for robbery. His tavern's name, in fact, was an allusion to the "prison grapevine," the mill of intrigue and scuttlebutt that had enlivened his days behind bars. It was a small irony that, as a felon, he couldn't vote at all, much less for Wallace.

  At first, John Ray seemed drunk and was not cooperative, especially when FBI agen
ts reminded him that he had visited his brother Jimmy in Jeff City the day before he escaped in a bread box. John claimed he'd had no contact with his brother since the breakout and had no idea of his whereabouts.

  The skeptical FBI agents asked John why he smiled when he gave his answers--he constantly flashed a curling smirk that was nearly identical to that of his brother Jimmy. John said it was just "a nervous reaction" that didn't mean anything, but he did concede that this unfortunate tic had sometimes gotten him in trouble with the law.

  "Jimmy was never the same after he got out of the Army," John said. "He went crazy, and got mixed up with drugs." If he did kill Martin Luther King, Jimmy was probably dead now--his conspirators would have tried to "seal his lips forever."649 But if Jimmy was still alive, he was certainly out of the country by now.

  Which country would he flee to? the agents wanted to know.

  John declined to speculate, but he did recall visiting Jimmy in prison once and getting an earful about Ian Smith and the good job he was doing down in Rhodesia. John Ray characterized himself as "a mild segregationist" and soon confided his frustration to the FBI agents. "What's all the excitement about?"650 he wondered aloud. "He only killed a nigger. If he'd killed a white man, you wouldn't be here."