Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (66 page)

"But ..."

"Do it!" DeLoach demanded, and hung up. He was too nervous to cook pancakes, too anxious to do anything but pace the floor.

An hour later, Minnich called back and began with a single word: "Positive!"

The ruse had evidently worked. Sneyd had gripped his glass of water and drunk his fill. Investigators whisked the glass away and submitted it to a Scotland Yard crime lab. The latent prints lifted from the glass were instantly familiar to the FBI--they included a left thumbprint with an ulnar loop of twelve ridge counts. The prints not only matched Ray's fingerprints; they were identical to the ones Scotland Yard experts had found on the scribbled-over paper bag left at Fulham's Trustee Savings Bank.

"Good man!" DeLoach told Minnich. He hung up and then tried to reach Hoover.

He found the director at his usual weekend haunt in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria. Hoover was taciturn and seemed on the verge of grumpiness for being troubled on an off day. When DeLoach broke the good news--that the largest manhunt in the FBI's history was over--all the Old Man said was, "Fine--prepare the press release."
⁷¹⁹

AT ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL
⁷²⁰
in Manhattan, the requiem mass let out, and Robert Kennedy's body was shuttled to Penn Station to be placed on a memorial train for Washington. A stream of mourners began to flow from the dim Gothic cavern into the glare of the June day. Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird stepped into a limousine and took off for Central Park, where the presidential helicopter awaited. Along Fifth Avenue, the dignitaries were too numerous to count, but the energy of the crowds coalesced around a triad of women, the three national widows--Jackie, Coretta, and Ethel.

An FBI agent, waiting on the steps beneath the eaves, buttonholed Ramsey Clark as he emerged from the cathedral. The agent whispered in Clark's ear. The attorney general nodded his understanding. The long chase was over. A press release had already been offered to the media.

For a brief moment, the nation's highest law-enforcement official savored the news. He got on a mobile phone and had a word with DeLoach, then called Assistant Attorney General Fred Vinson and told him to get on a plane to London to oversee extradition proceedings.

But as Clark thought about the timing of the FBI's news flash, he began to suspect that Hoover was deliberately trying to upstage the senator's funeral. If there was one man the director loathed as much as King, it was Bobby Kennedy. How delicious it must have seemed to the Old Man, Clark thought, to trumpet the bureau's triumph here and now, just as the great bronze doors swung open and the chancel organist pulled out all the stops. It would have been in good taste to wait
⁷²¹
--even just an hour or two--but Hoover couldn't help himself.

Within a few minutes, word had spread through the crowds milling beneath the cathedral's enormous rose window. A pack of journalists approached Coretta Scott King. "They've caught your husband's killer in London--what is your reaction?" one of them asked insistently.

This was news to Coretta. Without saying a word, she turned to the reporter, smiled the sad, wise smile she had perfected through two months of widowhood, and gave a barely perceptible bow. Then she turned and melted into the throngs along Fifth Avenue.

LATER IN THE day, as the Kennedy memorial train crept down the Eastern Seaboard past tearful crowds lined along the tracks--killing several spectators in the process--word of Ray's capture reached Resurrection City. An announcer's voice boomed the sensational news over a public address system, and the shantytown crowds spontaneously erupted in a prolonged cheer that was soon undercut with grumbles of skepticism. Was Ray the right man? Was he the
only
man? How could he have gotten all the way to London without help?

Since Abernathy was in New York for the funeral, Hosea Williams, the "city manager," became the encampment's de facto spokesman. "We're happy he's been caught
⁷²²
--if he is the man," Williams told reporters. "But I'm not near as worried by that one man as about the system that produced him--the system that killed President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. We are concerned with a sick and evil society."

A few hours later, at dusk, the Kennedy train pulled in to Washington's Union Station, and the funeral motorcade eased through the city toward Arlington National Cemetery for a candlelight burial. The cortege passed by the Justice Department building on Constitution Avenue, where Kennedy had served as attorney general, and where the FBI was now contending with the world's response to the Ray capture while prosecutors began to assemble the case for his extradition hearings. As the motorcade rolled by the Lincoln Memorial, a choral group sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Along Constitution Avenue, thousands emerged from the hovels of the Poor People's Campaign and gave the senator a final mournful salute before his hearse passed onto the Memorial Bridge and crossed over the blue-black Potomac toward Arlington Cemetery.

IN WASHINGTON the following day, agents in the hallways of the FBI allowed themselves to bask for a moment in the glory of the capture. Although some newspaper editorials injected notes of doubt--
was there a conspiracy? was Ray a patsy?
--most papers and television accounts were full of praise, and on Capitol Hill politicians offered fulsome kudos to Hoover and his men.

Perhaps the loudest praise came from Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a longtime Hoover stalwart. "Some felt this case
⁷²³
was impossible," Byrd said. "Others have asserted their belief that Ray would never be captured, implying that the FBI did not really
want
to catch Ray. But in the end, Ray could not have run afoul of three finer law enforcement agencies in the world, even if he had tried--for his final capture resulted from the cooperation of the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and New Scotland Yard."

Hoover's critics saw the bureau in a new light; they found it refreshing to see the FBI
not
spying on citizens,
not
smearing reputations or pulling dirty tricks, but rather doing the close, hard work it was created for--solving major crimes important to the nation. The nine-week investigation was bold, relentless, methodical, creative, multidimensional. It had cost nearly two million dollars and had tied down more than half of Hoover's six thousand agents across the country. In many ways, it was one of the FBI's finest hours. All the advances the young Hoover had pushed for during the bureau's infancy--centralized fingerprint analysis, a state-of-the-art crime lab, a ballistics unit, a continental force of agents working in lockstep--had come fully into play in capturing Ray. For a single fugitive accused of a single crime, it was by far the most ambitious dragnet the FBI ever conducted. Ray had led them on a chase of more than twenty-five thousand miles.

In truth, the bureau had done a much better job of finding Ray than of ascertaining exactly why and how he had committed the crime. There were many unanswered questions--particularly having to do with Ray's motive, his sources of money, and his possible ties to the Sutherland bounty or to other floated plots on King's life. Ray's long flight was full of mysterious gaps, seeming contradictions, and stray facts that were difficult to reconcile. What were his connections to New Orleans, for example? What exactly did he do there and whom did he meet after he dropped off Charlie Stein? What possible role did his brothers play in the assassination, and in aiding Ray while he was on the lam? What help, if any, did he have in gathering his multiple aliases in Toronto? The trail that Ray had left was long, tortuous, and sketchy.

Ray's source of money was perhaps the biggest mystery. The FBI did not have it all sorted out, but it was clear that Ray must have pulled off several robberies while he was in flight. The bureau was intrigued to learn that on July 13, 1967, two men held up a bank
⁷²⁴
in Ray's old hometown of Alton, Illinois. The robbery, which took place a little more than two months after Ray's escape from Jeff City, netted $27,234 in cash. The case was never solved, but the FBI strongly suspected that the Ray brothers were involved.

Hoover intuitively understood how unusual Ray was. He was cryptic, difficult to pigeonhole; he refused to fit the assassin profile. "We are dealing with a man
⁷²⁵
who is not an ordinary criminal, but a man capable of doing any kind of sly act," Hoover told Ramsey Clark in a meeting on June 20. "Ray is not a fanatic [like] Sirhan Sirhan. But he is a racist and detests Negroes, and Martin Luther King. He had information about King speaking in other towns and then picked out Memphis. I think he acted entirely alone, but we are not closing our minds that others might be associated with him. We have to run down every lead."

Clark had no doubts that Ray had killed King, and that any conspiracy that existed was merely a crude and poorly funded one. The case against Ray was "one of the strongest
⁷²⁶
you're likely to see," Clark said years later. "The evidence is vast. And you can see the ways in which his environment--his history of unhappiness, his tragically sad circumstances--had forged a character who would do it." Despite the profusion of evidence against Ray, Clark predicted the case would be forever awash in conspiracy theories. "Some Americans,"
⁷²⁷
he said, "don't want to believe that one miserable person can bring such tragedy on our country and impact so powerfully on the destiny of us all."

None of the papers or newsmagazines mentioned just how close Ray had come to getting away with his crime--or that if he'd made it to Rhodesia, extraditing him would have been nearly impossible. And few accounts gave the Canadian, Mexican, Portuguese, and British authorities their due; catching Ray had been, in every sense, an international effort. Indeed, Hoover seemed a bit embarrassed that it was Scotland Yard, not the FBI, that finally caught his quarry.

For Cartha DeLoach, the hunt for James Earl Ray was the most satisfying case he ever worked on, and he could not have been prouder of his field agents who'd labored in obscurity all across the country--in Memphis, in Atlanta, in Birmingham, in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, and all points in between. "Nothing Ray did
⁷²⁸
threw us off the path," DeLoach boasted. "From the time we found that photograph at the bartender's school, his fate was sealed."

Like Clark, DeLoach entertained no doubts that the FBI had the right man. Ray, he said, "was a loner,
⁷²⁹
an egotist, a bigot, a man who in prison had said he was going to kill Dr. King, a man who wanted to be known, a man who
stalked
Dr. King: The evidence was overwhelming." For years to come, however, DeLoach would have to grapple with the public's understandable suspicion that Hoover's deep hatred of King must have influenced the case in some substantial way.

Yet paradoxically, DeLoach thought Hoover's contempt for King only
intensified
the manhunt. "Truth be told,"
⁷³⁰
DeLoach later wrote, "the old feud did have an impact--it drove us to prove, at every moment, that we were doing all we humanly could do to catch King's killer. That may have made our job harder--or at least more pressure-packed--but as I look back on the case, I still feel the same sense of satisfaction. The FBI had never pursued a fugitive with greater patience and imagination."