Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  Yet the Brushy Mountain guards didn't see it coming, even though everyone knew Ray had a penchant for disappearing from prisons. The deputy warden Herman Davis said it was "the most daring escape I ever heard of." Scrambling under that high-voltage wire, he said, was all but suicidal. "If you get yourself grounded, you're a cinder." Davis also wondered why the phone lines and power lines had gone out--were some of the prison guards colluding with Ray? "It sure makes you think, don't it?"

  It wasn't clear to Davis whether all the escapees had conspired together. Some might have seen the ladder and decided to join in the fun. But the five men who were out there with Ray were all hard-core offenders: two murderers, a rapist, and two armed robbers. C. Murray Henderson, the Tennessee commissioner of corrections, figured that at some point the other fugitives would break away from Ray, because, as he put it, "Ray's hot,743 hotter than any of them. They'd want him to split off."

  Within minutes of the breakout, authorities set in motion the largest fugitive search in Tennessee history. A posse of more than 150 men, armed with shotguns and miner's lamps, fanned out across the mountains. K9 police shepherds barked in the tenebrous woods, and highway patrolmen set up roadblocks within a twenty-mile radius. The families of guards who lived nearby packed up their things and took off.

  As soon as the phones were working again, the word was shot to officials in Nashville, and then to Washington. At President Jimmy Carter's behest, a reportedly "terrified" attorney general, Griffin Bell, had the FBI send in a team of agents. The FBI director, Clarence M. Kelley (Hoover had died in office in 1972), immediately gave the case the highest priority. Ray made the bureau's Ten Most Wanted list for the second time in his life. Forty thousand flyers were printed and would soon be circulated around the nation.

  After nearly a decade of incarceration, James Earl Ray was again where he most loved to be--on the outside, giving lawmen a good chase.

  THE LEGAL ROAD he'd traveled from his Memphis holding cell to this dramatic night in the mountains of East Tennessee was long and convoluted. In June 1969, after hiring a succession of lawyers, Ray had pleaded guilty in a Memphis courtroom to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and received a ninety-nine-year sentence. Three days later, however, he disavowed parts of his confession and claimed that though he had bought the rifle that killed King and had checked in to the flophouse only hours before the assassination, a criminal associate of his named Raoul had actually pulled the trigger. Ray's frustratingly vague tales about "Raoul" opened up an eternal cataract of conspiracy theories and captivated many within King's inner circle and family. Yet Ray couldn't offer a consistent description of his mysterious partner in crime, or give his nationality, or provide a phone number or an address. He couldn't produce a single witness who'd ever met "Raoul" or who'd ever seen him in the same place with Ray.

  Some people close to the case sensed that "Raoul" might be a cover for Ray's brother Jerry, whom the FBI still suspected as an accomplice in the assassination. But to most people, "Raoul" smelled distinctly like a figment of Ray's imagination--another a.k.a. in a life spent developing aliases and making shit up.

  What an enigmatic piece of work James Earl Ray had turned out to be, far stranger than anyone could have imagined. Lawyers, prosecutors, wardens, guards, prison shrinks, journalists--no one could figure him out. Through all his mumbled mixed signals, he seemed to have what psychiatrists call the "duping delight." He loved to launch people on crazy searches, even people who were trying to help him. It meant nothing to him for his own attorneys to waste months or even years burrowing in mazy rabbit holes, running down leads that he knew had no basis in fact. He took pleasure in other people's bafflement. Behind his clouds of squid ink, he seemed to be grinning. One of Ray's many lawyers had an expression: the only time you can tell if Ray's lying is when his lips are moving.

  Yet he craved something, maybe some brand of fame but maybe something else entirely. His lies seemed to have design, reaching for an endgame known only to him. Percy Foreman, the celebrity Houston lawyer who ended up representing him during his plea bargain in Memphis, put it this way: "Ray is smart like a rat.744 He has a strongly developed, fundamental instinct to be somebody. He would rather be a name than a number."

  SINCE HIS CONVICTION in Memphis, James Earl Ray had served his first few years in a Nashville prison, most of the time in solitary confinement--an ordeal that, he thought, may have made him "funny in the head."745 He hired J. B. Stoner, the neo-Nazi firebrand, as his lawyer. Jerry Ray quit his job as a Chicago golf course greenskeeper and moved south to become Stoner's bodyguard and driver.

  Ray was released from solitary in early 1971. Shortly thereafter, the Tennessee Corrections Department transferred him to Brushy Mountain, where almost immediately he set about trying to escape. One night in May 1971, he left a dummy of pillows in his cell room bed, squeezed through a ventilation duct, and pried open a manhole cover leading to a steam shaft. He might have made it to freedom had he not been repelled by the four-hundred-degree temperatures lurking deeper inside the tunnel.

  A year later, in May of 1972, Ray's beloved George Wallace, campaigning again for president but renouncing his old segregationist policies, was paralyzed from the waist down by an assassin's bullet.

  For a time, during the mid-1970s, Ray's interest turned from escaping to legal stratagems designed to win a new trial. Constantly reading law books, he burned through another string of lawyers, but his legal efforts foundered. In December 1976, his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit--as well as by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two months later, in February 1977, his case received another blow. The Justice Department, which had been leading an inquiry into the King assassination, concluded in its final report that the FBI's investigation was "thoroughly, honestly and successfully conducted ... The sum of all the evidence of Ray's guilt points to him exclusively."

  On the eve of his escape, Ray's only hope was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which the U.S. House of Representatives had recently impaneled to investigate the JFK and MLK murders. In the late winter, the House's chief counsel, Richard Sprague, had come to Brushy Mountain and led several long cell-block interviews with Ray. The talks got off to a shaky start, but in recent weeks the prisoner finally seemed to be opening up. Ray was even beginning to come clean, hinting that "Raoul" might be fictitious after all. Upon his final interview with Ray, Sprague was moved to declare with complete confidence: "Raoul does not and did not exist."746

  While these interviews were being conducted, a curious development was taking place just outside Brushy Mountain's walls. Jerry Ray had come to the Petros area to live for several months that spring and was seen casing the wooded terrain outside the prison. Then he visited Jimmy one week before the escape--much as their brother John had visited Ray just before his breakout from Missouri's Jeff City prison ten years earlier. (John could not lend his help this time around; he was in prison, serving an eighteen-year federal sentence for robbing a bank.)

  The timing of Ray's breakout was beginning to make sense. His legal prospects had dimmed. He'd grown weary of maneuvering. He figured he had nothing left to lose. His brother had scoped out the country around the prison and had probably given him a recon report. So his thoughts returned, fully and passionately, to escape.

  "You always have it747 in the back of your mind," he told an interviewer from Playboy only days before he went over the wall. "When you come to the penitentiary, you check out various escape routes. You file them away, and, if the opportunity arises, well, you can go ahead. I suspect that everyone in here has it in the back of his mind. The only thing is whether they have the fortitude to go through with it."

  BY SATURDAY AFTERNOON, two of the runaways had been captured--but James Earl Ray was still out there. Authorities stepped up the manhunt. Governor Ray Blanton called out the National Guard, and soon the skies shuddered with helicopters that were equipped with infrared heat-sensing scopes much li
ke the ones that American servicemen had used to hunt Vietcong in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  Predictably, a hue and cry rose up in the national media. Reporters were calling it "the escape of the century." The ease with which Ray had broken out from a maximum-security prison, some said, was further proof of the massive conspiracy that was behind the death of Martin Luther King. The people who had killed King now wanted Ray to disappear (or die) before he could testify in Washington in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ray's escape wasn't an escape at all, some said; it was an abduction.

  Ralph Abernathy, who had stepped down from the SCLC, said he was "convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt"748 that "authorities in very high places have planned the escape. I would say Ray is going to be destroyed." Abernathy's worries were echoed by Representative Louis Stokes, the Ohio Democrat who was serving as chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Stokes speculated that the escape was "engineered to see that Ray749 is permanently lost and never heard from again. There are people out there who would not want him to talk."

  An even more horrifying conspiracy theory rose up from the depths of the newspapers. As it happened, Martin Luther King's father, Daddy King, was only forty miles away from Brushy Mountain on that particular weekend. He was scheduled to preach in a Baptist church in Knoxville on Sunday. People began to speculate that this was not a coincidence at all, that the escape was somehow tied to King's appearance in Knoxville: people literally feared that King's life was in danger.

  It wasn't as crazy as it sounded, given the tragedies that had befallen Daddy King since his son's assassination. In 1969, his other son, A. D. King, was found dead at the age of thirty-eight, floating in his swimming pool in Atlanta. Then, in 1974, the matriarch of the family, Daddy King's beloved wife, Alberta, was gunned down by a deranged black man while she was playing the organ during a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  How much pain could one man bear? How much bad fortune could be directed at a single family? On Saturday, reporters reached Daddy King in Knoxville and asked him about the manhunt for his son's assassin that was going on in the mountains just to the west. "I hope they don't kill him,"750 King said. "Let's hope he doesn't get killed. You're looking at the face of a black man who hates nobody." But King wasn't taking any chances, either, especially with a posse of known murderers on the loose. He had a bodyguard with him at all times, he said, and he'd "stopped checking into hotels in my own name a long time ago. I go nowhere without someone traveling with me, without security at both ends. I've gotten used to it."

  The hysteria that Ray's escape had generated was understandable, as were the public suspicions that something much larger was afoot. Nonetheless, prison officials insisted that--so far, at least--they'd found absolutely no evidence that anyone had aided the runaways, and no evidence of a wider conspiracy either inside or outside the prison walls. Warden Stonney Lane, somewhat irritable from having to return prematurely from his vacation to deal with the crisis, promised a full investigation. For now, all he could report was that the phone lines had gone out because the prison had received too many calls all at once from people down in Petros who'd heard the steam whistle shrieking. The power lines had temporarily fizzled as a result of what he rather opaquely called a "panic button overload on the penitentiary circuits."

  Mostly, though, Lane was focused on finding Ray and the others. He vowed that the search would venture into "every hollow and back road where a man could hide."

  Governor Ray Blanton, meanwhile, tried to reassure the nation that, whatever else happened, his National Guardsmen and corrections department officers would not shoot James Earl Ray. They were, he said, "under orders to use all possible restraint." He conceded that the breakout might have been avoided, that there was possibly "a failure and a laxity" on the part of the Brushy Mountain guards. But, he added, this James Earl Ray character was something else, a fish too big and slippery for any state pen to keep.

  "It's not a matter of we can't handle him," the governor said. "It's a matter of we can't contain him. The breakout was concocted, designed, and planned in such a manner that he could be in Guatemala now."

  BY SUNDAY MORNING, officials were fairly boiling with frustration. Although three of the prisoners had been caught, Ray remained at large. The full might of the state and the nation could not bring the prime fugitive to bay--not the planes and helicopters with their heat-sensing machines, not the National Guardsmen with their night-vision goggles, not the FBI with its topo maps and roving surveillance cameras. So the search would have to come down to the man hunter's oldest technology, the surest technology of all. It would have to come down to the dogs.

  Sammy Joe Chapman751 was the captain of the bloodhound team at Brushy Mountain. He was a big, pale guy with a miner's lamp blazing from his forehead and an impressive Civil War mustache that crimped and tweezed when he smiled. People around the prison called him a "sniffer" and a "dog boy." He'd spent his life tracking coons and hunting for ginseng root in the Cumberland woods, learning what he called "the tricks of the mountains." He knew all the landmarks around the New River valley--Flag Pole, Chimney Top, Twin Forks, Frozen Head. He knew where the burned-out cabins were, and the abandoned mine shafts, and the naked faces of the mountains where the strip miners had done their crude scrapings.

  Chapman had grown impatient with the feds and all their instruments and all their worrying. He knew that his bloodhounds would find Ray in due course. All they needed was a good drenching rainstorm. That was the funny thing about bloodhounds: their extraordinary snouts didn't work well in dry weather. When the forest was in want of moisture, all the wild odors mingled into olfactory confusion, and the dogs couldn't pick out a man's clear scent.

  Then, on Sunday afternoon, the weather turned. For hours and hours it rained strong and steady, flushing out the forest, driving the stale airborne smells to the ground. Chapman looked at the gray skies and smiled.

  Around nightfall he put a harness to his two best hounds, a pair of fourteen-month-old bitches named Sandy and Little Red. He'd personally trained them, teaching them to hunt in perfect silence--none of the usual yelping and singing normally associated with hounds. Late that night, along the New River about eight miles north of the prison, the dogs picked up something strong. The wet ground quickened their senses, just as Chapman knew it would. Tugged by Sandy and Little Red, Chapman followed the river toward the Cumberland strip mine. After a few miles, they crossed over to the other side, then started up the steep flanks of Usher Top Mountain. An hour into the chase, the hounds remained keen.

  Now Chapman radioed back to the prison: "We've got a hot trail!" He crossed a set of railroad tracks and a logging road and a clearing strewn with coal. In his headlamp, Chapman could see a rusty conveyor belt and other industrial machinery of the West Coal Company. It was nearly midnight, but the dogs kept leading him uphill, toward Usher Top. For two hours, he strained and struggled up the face of the ridge, his dogs never letting up. At one point he halted them and heard thrashing in the blackberry bushes, not more than fifty yards up the mountain.

  In another ten minutes, Chapman and the dogs had nearly reached the mountain's summit. Halting his dogs again, he heard silence--nothing but the crickets and a slight breeze whispering through the oaks and the rush of the river down in the moonlit valley, hundreds of feet below. It was ten minutes past two on Monday morning. Sandy and Little Red yanked Chapman a few feet farther. They snuffled and sniffed in the wet leaves. Their bodies went rigid, but still they didn't bark or bay--they only wagged their tails.

  Chapman shined his lamp at a bulge in the forest floor. From his shoulder holster, he produced a Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Special. "Don't move or I'll shoot!"

  Then, like a ghoul, a pale white man rose lurchingly from the leaves. He was wet and haggard and smeared in mud. His scratched arms were crusted with poison ivy. He wore a navy blue sweatshirt and dungarees and black track shoes. James Earl Ray's fifty-four hours of free
dom had come to an end.

  Chapman slapped some cuffs over the fugitive's wrists and frisked him. Ray had a map of East Tennessee and $290--a stash he'd apparently saved up from his $35-per-month job in the prison laundry. Aside from the map, he had nothing on his person that appeared to have come from outside the prison, nothing that indicated he'd had any help.

  "Ray, how do you feel?"

  "Good," he mumbled, averting his eyes in the lamp glare.

  "Had anything to eat?"

  "Naw," Ray said. "Only a little wheat germ, is all."

  Chapman got on the radio to share the good news--and in the process learned that other bloodhounds had found another fugitive down on the New River several hours earlier (the sixth and final runaway wouldn't be caught until Tuesday). Chapman congratulated Sandy and Little Red, tugging at their slobbery dewlaps. But he had to hand it to Ray, too. "For a 49-year-old man752 who didn't know the mountains," he said later, "Ray really didn't do bad."

  Inmate #65477 headed down the mountain, back to a prison term that would last, unbroken by any more escapes, until his death in 1998 from hepatitis C (probably contracted through a tainted blood transfusion he would receive after several black inmates repeatedly stabbed him). Now, tromping in manacles through the soggy Cumberland woods, Ray didn't say a word. He only thought about his mistakes and what he'd do differently next time, if he ever got another chance.

  "It's disappointing being caught,"753 he told an interviewer back at the prison. "I wasn't happy being run down. I'd rather be ... out there. But it's not the end of the world. There's tomorrow."