Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (59 page)

"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 man
⁶⁵⁶
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 holdup
⁶⁵⁷
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 demonstration
⁶⁵⁸
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 rebirth
⁶⁵⁹
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 rotunda
⁶⁶⁰
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 tasks
⁶⁶²
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 paranoia
⁶⁶⁵
--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 history
⁶⁶⁶
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 house
⁶⁶⁷
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.