Killing King
Page 10
The HSCA also confirmed that beyond his tendency to spin tales, Kimble had been arrested in Louisiana for impersonating an officer, aggravated assault, and possession of illegal weapons. His wife told investigators that Kimble used fake medical degrees and other documents to gain employment at a New Orleans hospital and thereby obtain access to controlled drugs.9 Kimble also had significant Klan contacts. In July 1967 he met with four Grand Dragons of the Klan at his home; afterward he disappeared for several days. Other meetings with Klan leaders occurred earlier in February and March 1967. Kimble was also a suspect in the bombings of union officers and other labor-
related violence; he ended up serving a federal sentence for those crimes.
There is no certain proof that Kimble and Ray met each other, but if they did, Kimble’s connections could have proven useful to Ray. And in several ways Kimble would have been a good match for Ray’s “Raul.” If Ray did meet Kimble, even casually, Kimble may have served as a model for the Raul figure Ray would ultimately develop to explain away so many of his suspicious movements, and his eventual, timely appearance—with a rifle—at a certain Memphis boardinghouse on April 4, 1968.
Whatever or whoever Ray met in in Montreal, his movements suggest that something and someone fundamentally changed his mind about what to do next. Having failed to get a woman to endorse his application for a passport, conventional accounts suggest he soon went straight back into the United States. Ray, of course, attributed his apparently spontaneous return to the machinations of the mysterious Raul, who sent him onward from Montreal to run drugs back into the United States. But if this is false, something else must account for Ray’s willingness to risk recapture by returning to America. Without Ray as a reliable source, we are left with speculation.
Ray may have heard loose gossip in bars, perhaps from someone like Kimble, about where one would go to find out more about the kind of bounty offers that circulated in Missouri State Penitentiary. Someone like Kimble, whether he had direct knowledge of a bounty or not, could certainly have suggested white supremacist connections. John Nicol, an investigative reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, using never-before-seen Royal Canadian Mounted Police files as well as HSCA documents, suggests that Ray may have stayed in Toronto before reentering the United States.10 Previously, Ray was believed to have spent time in Toronto only after the King assassination, during his escape.
Canada, and Toronto in particular, had its own burgeoning white supremacist movement by the late 1960s, with Christian Identity influences going back as far as the 1940s. At least one Klan expert speculated that Ray may have made contact with individuals connected to these groups.11 Nicol’s investigation went further, showing that the HSCA identified specific individuals with white supremacist backgrounds who relocated to Canada in the 1960s. A seal on the records prevents us from knowing exactly why these men were persons of interest to Congress. We do know that these men became the vanguard for J. B. Stoner’s NSRP after 1963, creating franchises throughout North America. Stoner trained these individuals and nourished their racism in a city that saw as much segregationist violence as any other city in the Deep South: Birmingham, Alabama. It was a place James Earl Ray had never been before. It was also a place where white supremacists plotted as many as three different assassination attempts on Martin Luther King Jr., in 1958 and 1963.
Ray arrived in Birmingham on Sunday, August 25, 1967, still using the name Rayns when checking into the Grenada Hotel. The following day, he would take the first step in establishing a new U.S. identity as Eric Galt, by checking into a rooming house under that name. According to the manager at the rooming house, Ray claimed that he was taking a long vacation from his recent employment at the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, possibly staying several months. Ray’s immediate priority seems to have been to establish a basic “Galt” identity. Two days after checking in as Galt at the rooming house, he rented a safe deposit box. Apparently one use of the box was to stash his other identity documents; he was very sensitive to the risk of having conflicting sets of identification papers in his possession. That would prove to be a reasonable concern, since in June 1968, this discrepancy led to Ray’s capture in London.
These actions, though seemingly trivial, may be the start of a pattern of activity to establish a false background as an extreme racist, someone whom white supremacists could trust to partake in an assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. if Ray could find the sponsors. In the world of spy craft, this is known as building a legend; anyone who infiltrates a country or an organization needs to have some kind of record, as close to genuine as possible, to make themselves attractive and believable to their associates and employers. Charles Faulkner, in his excellent microanalysis of Ray’s behavior, added that the bank Ray used for his safety deposit box was the go-to branch for the United Klans of America; research by the authors establish that the specific branch Ray used was also used by the National States Rights Party.12 Additionally, Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Ingalls shipyard in particular, was a hotbed for Klan activity.13 Faulkner (citing additional examples of legend-building that will be discussed in later chapters) argues that Ray, lacking any legitimate connection to extremist groups, felt the need to plant bread crumbs to entice racists to involve him in a conspiracy, and to ultimately collect a share of a bounty.
Ray’s next move was to purchase a sporty used Mustang, get it registered, and then obtain an Alabama driver’s license for himself in the name of Eric S. Galt. Ray was not required to present birth or other identification to get the license; he stated on his application that he had been previously licensed in 1962 in Louisiana. Within approximately a week of his arrival in Birmingham, James Earl Ray, also known as John Rayns, was able to present at least minimal paperwork to legally identify himself as Eric S. Galt. That would be the identity he would use for the next several months, during his time in Birmingham, through Atlanta, and all the way to Memphis. Eventually, his continuing use of the Galt alias allowed the FBI to quickly track and identify him, based on the registration of the Alabama-tagged Mustang that he abandoned in Atlanta after the assassination.
With his first priority met, Ray was mobile with enough identification to get through a traffic stop, book a motel room, or cross a border. Then, for the next several weeks, Eric Galt did nothing—well, nothing much that we know of. The rooming house manager in Birmingham told the FBI that he was a quiet fellow, spent time alone in the lounge during the day watching television, ate breakfast late to avoid mingling with the other tenants, and otherwise spent a lot of time in his room. Later, there would be a number of witnesses to Ray’s activities in Mexico and in Los Angeles; he frequented bars there, as he had in Canada. But if he frequented bars in Birmingham, nobody talked about it. He did go out for one known activity: dance lessons; he also enrolled in correspondence courses in locksmithing, a useful skill for someone still pursuing a career in crime. By themselves the dance lessons seem very much out of character for Ray (and he would enroll for another dance course in Los Angeles a few months later), but in combination with another of his options, they make much more sense.
Ray reportedly sold sex magazines in prison, ordered sex manuals while in Canada, asked his brother about joining him in the pornography business, and in Birmingham, as Eric Galt, ordered a complete filmmaking system from a company in Chicago. The system included a Super 8 camera, a dual projector, a combination splicing machine, and a twenty-foot remote control—everything one would need to make sex movies, including the ability to film in slow motion and under different types of lighting. While in Montreal, he had sent a money order to a manufacturer in California for a compound that would turn regular glass into a two-way mirror. Clearly, with the right subjects, Ray could parlay photography into a less risky income source than armed robbery or, under the right circumstances, use it to blackmail victims to raise money in his quest for a Canadian passport and ultimate emigration to Africa.
W
hile in Birmingham, Ray seems to have spent time establishing a Galt identity and focusing on his filmmaking pursuits and his dance and locksmith classes. But does that account for all of Ray’s time in Birmingham? We simply don’t know. We do know that his rooming house was very close to NSRP national headquarters. The Canadian white supremacists investigated by the HSCA, for reasons still unknown, all once worked in that building as far back as 1963. Ed Fields was coy when asked, decades later, if Ray paid the group a visit during his stay in Birmingham in 1967. While Fields denied having any direct and personal interactions with the future accused assassin, he also would not dismiss the possibility that Ray met with others from the NSRP.14
Ray needn’t have visited the NSRP headquarters to pursue rumors of a King bounty. If he had gone to a local bar, as was his custom, he would have found that Birmingham bars were still frequented by the old hard-core racists who had been involved in years of racist violence. Ray might have seen coverage of the convictions and pending jail sentences for the White Knights in Mississippi. If he turned up any particular information about a bounty related to the White Knights, he most likely also came across newspaper and television coverage of the FBI’s massive effort in Mississippi, the trials, and the testimony of informants. If so, that might have raised some flags for the ever-cautious Ray, turning him back to other options.
Ray apparently became restless in Birmingham; he didn’t seem to be having much fun—at least according to the folks at the dance studio. But his car tags and driver’s license now proved that “Eric S. Galt” was an “Alabama boy” (reinforced with a Confederate sticker on his Mustang). He had figured out what he needed to proceed with his plans to produce pornographic movies. The movie equipment had arrived from Chicago on October 4. He was not satisfied with the movie camera that had been substituted and wrote to request a replacement. But Ray was not willing to wait and that same day went out, bought a Polaroid instant camera, and wrote a letter to the dance studio canceling the rest of his lessons. The Polaroid would just have to do for starters. By October 6, he was on the road again. His rooming house manager, Mr. Cherpes, related that just before Ray left, he made a telephone call to Pascagoula, Mississippi, supposedly to verify employment, stating that he was headed there to take a job on a boat. Ray later denied saying that and claimed instead that he had headed to Baton Rouge to try to contact Raul about a smuggling job. If nothing else, this does support the idea that Ray was informing someone about his moves, in anticipation of future contact.
What Ray really did on his way from Birmingham to Mexico, who Ray really saw, or where he really stopped, remains uncertain. Perhaps he didn’t need to stop anywhere at all, since his known activities in Birmingham and his next stops in Mexico demonstrate that he was still pursuing other options. He might have gone to Birmingham in pusuit of a King bounty, but he now was going on to Mexico with something entirely different in mind. And in Mexico, Ray’s social life was about to dramatically improve—at least for a few months.
7
on hold
There are a variety of views of Ray’s departure from Birmingham, his subsequent sojourn in Mexico in October 1967, and his move to Los Angeles by the end of that year. According to Ray, the trip was the result of “Raul” giving him a little smuggling work to keep him busy while holding him in reserve for some future use.1 Others have written that Ray’s sojourn in Mexico ties in with his recruitment by organized crime as a low-level drug smuggler.2 Still others present it as one more interlude in his decades-long role as an asset for the CIA.3 Our view is that Mexico tells us a great deal about Ray’s personal agenda in 1967: Ray still had an interest in collecting a bounty on King, but it was only one option, not the final one. That stage would not happen until after all the easier options began to run out at the end of 1967 in Los Angeles.
Ray appears to have made a quick and relatively direct trip to Mexico from Alabama, crossing into Mexico on October 7. He was issued a tourist card as Eric S. Galt when he crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, New Mexico. Apparently he drove straight on to Acapulco, staying for four days in the same hotel as on his first trip there in 1959.
There is sufficient reason to speculate that Ray, in fact, did engage in some cross-border smuggling, both going to and coming back from Mexico. Journalist William Bradford Huie, who worked closely with Ray on a series for Look magazine while Ray faced trial, discovered evidence that a Mexican federal police officer had trailed Ray to his hotel in Acapulco. Huie also discovered that the hotel registration page that should have contained Ray’s name suspiciously had a section cut out of it. There was a handwritten explanation at the bottom of the page, suggesting that on October 14 (a week after Ray had entered Mexico), a federal police officer named Ramon del Rio had taken and examined the page. Huie interpreted this as an indication that there had been some suspicion that Ray was involved in smuggling and that he had been the subject of at least a minimal investigation.4 That might also explain why Ray moved on after only four days; Ray himself said he left because Acapulco was just too expensive. It would be no surprise to find Ray smuggling drugs into Mexico, since he admitted that he had done so on his first trip there years before.
Still, it appears that Ray’s primary goals in Mexico were getting into the pornographic film business and exploring options for staying outside the United States. He had obtained the equipment, and with the right subjects, Ray would have everything he needed to make sex movies.
As Eric S. Galt, Ray moved from Acapulco to Puerto Vallarta, which was still undeveloped and not the tourist haven it would become in future years. He spent three weeks there, first at the Hotel Rio and then at a more expensive beach hotel, the Tropicana. As he had at Gray Rocks in Canada, Ray cultivated an upscale image. He was well-dressed, drove a flashy sports car, spent money, and presented himself as an American writer, complete with cameras and a portable typewriter.
Ray himself discussed visiting a local brothel repeatedly “on business.”5 He also visited other brothels, establishing relationships with two prostitutes: first, a girl calling herself La Chilindrina and then another woman who went by Irma La Douce. Ray spent an extended period with Irma, drinking, having sex, sleeping late, and visiting the beach—all a total change in behavior from his previous stops since his prison escape. Ray used Irma as his first photographic test subject. Following a trip to the beach, he asked her to sit in his car, exposing herself with her skirts up. The Polaroid photo turned out poorly, and Ray tore it up; he stopped a few miles later and made a second attempt, but it, too, turned out badly. This seemed to upset Ray, and the next day Irma described him as irritable, complaining of a headache and ready to get into a fight in one of the local bars.6
A few days later, Ray showed up drunk at the bar where Irma worked, and she refused to sleep with him that night. She also refused his offer of marriage a day or so later. Ray threatened that he would begin to see the other women again. That didn’t change her mind, so he tried making out with the first woman he met, but that didn’t work either. Eventually Ray moved to a more upscale hotel and began visiting a new hotel bar, becoming friends with the bartender there. While out one night hitting the clubs and bars, Ray and his bartender friend met a young woman who caught Ray’s fancy. She doubled as a cigarette girl and club photographer and was much more attractive than the prostitutes Ray had first approached. The two men picked up the woman, and Ray began dating her, taking her to the beach, each photographing the other. They spent nights together.
Ray was clearly taken with the woman and eventually confided to her that he was making good money with marijuana sales. He was buying it on weekends at the nearby Yelapa resort and smuggling it back to sell to tourists on the local beaches. Ray wanted her to go with him on his next trip, probably as cover. It turned out that telling her that was a mistake; the woman had a young child and wanted nothing to do with marijuana. She made a clean break with Ray, telling him she could not see him anymore.7
Ray also might have thought that he could obtain citizenship by getting into business in Mexico. He spent considerable time with a couple of different bartenders and expressed interest in investing in some sort of business. But the best offer he could get was to trade a plot of land for his Mustang; he refused that offer. One of the options Ray more seriously considered was getting into the bar business, which might have kept him in Mexico. Bartending was a very portable skill, much like locksmithing. Both were skills that Ray seriously pursued after his escape from Missouri State Penitentiary; they would have served him well if he had made it overseas. During 1967, Ray appears to have had much more interest in his locksmithing, dance, and bartending courses and porno filmmaking than in a King bounty. Known to be extremely tightfisted with money, he spent a good deal of what he had on lessons and equipment for these options, hauling the film equipment all the way from Birmingham to Memphis and continuing the locksmithing course even after his arrival in Atlanta. We feel that this is a good indication that Ray was operating as his own man, with his own goals and plans, and was not being run by any other parties during 1967.
It’s also worthwhile to note that while reading U.S. News & World Report in Mexico, Ray happened across an advertisement for immigrants wanted in Rhodesia. Ray wrote them for information but had not received an answer by the time he left Mexico.9 James Earl Ray’s Mexican jaunt and his initial porno film efforts ended in the middle of November 1967. Ray moved directly to Los Angeles, and his stay there became the springboard for his substantive involvement in the King murder.